Subject: A Kratzmach Tale (rated PG)

Not long ago and far away, Santa was getting ready for his annual rounds . .
but there were problems everywhere.  Four of his elves got sick, and the
trainee elves did not produce the toys as fast as the regular ones so Santa
was beginning to feel the pressure of being behind schedule.  Then Mrs.
Claus told Santa that her mom was coming to visit. This stressed Santa even
more. When he went to harness the reindeer, he found that three of them were
about to give birth and two had jumped the fence and were out, heaven knows
where.  More Stress.

Then when he began to load the sleigh one of the boards cracked and the toy
bag fell to the ground and scattered the toys. So frustrated, Santa went
into the house for a cup of coffee and a shot of whiskey.

When he went to the cupboard, he found the elves had hid the liquor and
there was nothing to drink.  In his frustration, he dropped the coffee pot
and it broke into hundreds of little pieces all over the kitchen floor.

He went to get the broom  and found that mice had eaten the straw it was
made from.

Just then  the doorbell rang and Santa cussed on his way to the door.  He
opened  the door and there was a little angel with a great big Christmas
tree.

The angel said:  "Where would you like to put this tree Santa?"

And that my friend, is how the little angel came to be on top of the
Christmas tree.
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                      SANTA CLAUS: An Engineer's Perspective

 I. There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in 
   the  world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim,
Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist religions, this reduces the workload for 
Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the 
Population Reference Bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 
children per house hold, that comes to 108 million homes, 
presuming that there is at  least one good child in each. 

 II. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the 
 different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he 
travels 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 Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second --- 3,000
times 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, and a
conventional reindeer can  run (at best) 15 miles per hour.

 III. 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 could pull ten times the
normal amount, the job can't be done with 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). 

 IV. 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second crates enormous air 
 resistance --- this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as 
a  spacecraft re-entering 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 
 reindeer 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 reached the fifth house on 
his trip.  Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of 
 accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s.. in .001 seconds, would 
be  subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 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 crushing his bones and organs 
and  reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo. 

 V.  Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now