It’s important to instill the truth in Children—even if it hurts. That means dispelling all false rumors, including the one about Santa being real. The best way to do this is to present them with all of the knowledge you have to support your case.Here are the TRUE facts about Santa Claus:
1. No known species of reindeer can fly. However, there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not completely rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has seen.
2. There are an estimated 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. But since Santa doesn’t handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15 percent of the total—a mere 378 million people. We’ll presume that there are 3.5 children per household, that’s 91.8 million homes—assuming there’s at least one good child to each home.
3. If Santa travels east to west, he has 31 hours of Christmas due to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth. This works out to 822.6 visits per second—or 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 whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get into the sleigh and move on to the next house.
Assuming that these 91,800,000 stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, we know is false), we’re talking about .76 miles per household, a total trip of 75,500,000 miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours. This means that Santa’s sled is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times faster than the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second. A conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
4. The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized Lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting the ability of ‘flying reindeer’ (see point 1) to pull perhaps 10 times the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight or even nine. We need more. Actually, we need 214,191 more, or a total of 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload—not counting the weight of the sleigh—to 353,420 tons—four times the weight of the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth.
5. This 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance, which will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14,300,000,000,000,000,000 (14.3 quintillion) joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will almost instantaneously burst into flames, exposing the reindeer behind them, who will repeat the process, and they will also create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to acceleration forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.
In conclusion, if Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he’s dead now.
That’s it for me until Wednesday. Don’t worry, I’m working tomorrow, carrying out a tradition that goes back many years. I’m going through the desks of my workers looking for evidence of wrongdoing while they’re at home goofing off.
To stay one step in front of the competition, check out my latest book: Dr. Young’s Guide to Demotivating Employees at Dolyttle & Seamore.
While I don’t really have any interest in hearing what you have to say about anything, if you have a burning desire to get something off your chest, email me: dryoung@demotivationist.com.
