Is There A Father Christmas?

**MANICHAEAN** · 21-12-2013, 11:10 AM

1. No known species of reindeer can fly but there ARE 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified and whilst most of these are insects and germs this does not completely rule out flying reindeer.

2. There are 2 Billion children (under 18) in the world but since father Xmas doesn’t handle Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Jewish children that reduces the workload to 15% of the total – 378 million or so. At an average of 3.5 children per household that’s 91.8 million homes. One presumes there is at least one good child in each home.

3. Thanks to time zones and the rotation of the Earth, assuming he travels East to West, Father Xmas has 31 hours of Christmas to work with. This works out at 822.6 visits per second. In other words, Father Xmas has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat a mince pie, drink a drink, get back up the chimney, back into the sleigh, and move to the next house. Assuming that these 91.8 million homes are distributed fairly evenly, which we know to be false but for the sake of these calculations we will accept, we are talking an average of 0.78 miles per household, a trip of 75.5 million miles. This means that Father Xmas’ sleigh is travelling at 650 miles per second, i.e. 3,000 times the speed of sound. For comparison, the fastest man made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe moves at 27.4 MPS whilst the average reindeer runs at 15mph.

4. The sleigh payload adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set, which weighs about 2lbs, the sled is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Father Xmas who is invariably described as overweight. On Land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds so even granting that ‘flying reindeer’ (see point 1.) could pull ten times the usual amount father Xmas can’t do the job with eight or even nine reindeer – he needs 214,000. This increases the weight, not even including the sleigh, to 353,430 tons. Again for comparison this is four times the weight of the QE2.

5. 353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance that will heat the reindeer in the same manner as a spacecraft re-entering the Earths atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy – per second – each. In short they will burst into flames almost instantaneously exposing the next pair of reindeer and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire team of will be vaporized within 4.26 thousands of a second. Meanwhile father Xmas will have been be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.6 times the force of gravity. A 300lb Father Xmas would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015lbs of force.

Conclusion: there was a Father Xmas but he is dead now…….following this ‘enlightenment’ my words of wisdom are ‘if you want some Christmas presents do what I do and buy them yourself’