However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish,
or Buddhist (except maybe in Japan) religions, this reduces the workload
for Christmas night to 15% of the total or 378,000,000 (according to the
Population Reference Bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5
children per household that comes to 108 million homes, presuming there
is at least one good child in each.

Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the
different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming east to
west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second.
This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child,
Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump
down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents
under the tree,eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up
the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house.

Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed
around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept
for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78
miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting
bathroom stops or breaks. This means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at
650 miles per second–3,000 times the speed of sound. For the purposes
of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses Space Probe,
moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and the conventional reindeer can
run (at best) 15 miles per hour.

The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming
that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized LEGO set (two
pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting
Santa himself.

On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even
granting that the “flying” reindeer can pull 10x the normal amount, the
job can’t be done with the eight or even nine of them—Santa would need
360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of
the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of
the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch) 600,000 tons moving at
650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this would heat
up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spaceship reentering the
earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3
quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst
into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the pair behind them and
creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team
would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about
the time Santa reaches the fifth house on his trip.

Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating
from a dead stop to 650 mps in .001 seconds, would be subjected to
acceleration forces of 17,000 G’s. A 250 pound Santa (which seems
ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015
pounds of force, instantly crumbling his bones and organs and reducing
him to a quivering blob of pink goo. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he’s
dead now. But we wouldn’t make a silly mistake of assuming that
Santa and his might reindeers are composed of such weak biological
structure like us now would we!

Merry Christmas readers and members of Nihon Review!