Have you ever sat down and actually thought about the physics of Santa Claus? Grabbed a calculator and tried to make the numbers work? I have; let’s consider these fun facts for a moment. If Santa Claus were to begin delivering gifts at 8pm Christmas Eve on the East Coast (and I think we all agree he couldn’t start much earlier than 8) and finish delivering them by 6am Christmas morning on the West Coast, that would give him a 13 hour window to cover the continental US (putting aside Canada and Mexico, and for that matter, the rest of the world).
According to the US Census Bureau, in 2015 there were some 124.6 million households in the US. Now clearly, many of these households are merged at Christmastime, others don’t celebrate Christmas at all while still others are just… naughty. BUT ~ even presuming that Santa visits just 1% (just ONE percent!!) of those 124.6 million households in the US, in order to accomplish this task in 13-hours he would have to visit 1600 homes per minute, or 27 houses per second.
And talk about eating on the run — just as problematic is the tradition of leaving out milk & cookies. If even ONE percent OF THAT ONE PERCENT of the populace left milk out for him and he were to politely sip one ounce from each… that’s 12,460 ounces of milk. This is 97.3 gallons of milk in 13 hours. (97.3 gallons = 807 POUNDS worth of milk…. Santa might be generally depicted as overweight, but this is still three to four times his weight. Where is he going to pee?) A single bite from each cookie amounting to one-tenth of an ounce (or 5 grams each) would be 137.35 lbs of food, and not just food, but cookie, which I can only imagine would impact like a brick and be unable to pass. To be clear, just nibbles and sips from .0001% of the US population’s households would equal nearly HALF a TON of milk & cookie dough consumed in a window of 13 hours.
Speaking of weight, a bigger issue to consider is that PAYLOAD atop the sleigh. If Santa were to pack just ONE GIFT per house for his “one percent of US households” — and even if each box were to contain NOTHING at all — the sheer weight of 1,246,000 empty boxes (each empty box weighing 11 ounces) would result in a payload clocking in at 856,625 lbs, or 428 tons. That equates to the weight of 65 elephants, 11 eighteen-wheelers, 5 space shuttles or two 747s. Again, this is without a single toy… just the boxes (and I presume IOU notes inside, though I didn’t factor the weight of a million+ sheets of paper into the above). Now placing such a weight equal to 245 SUVs atop a house would subject its roof to structural stresses no house in America was designed to withstand and no structural codes were created to accommodate. In short, every house Santa’s sleigh would land on would collapse under the weight, and by Christmas morning each household on Santa’s list would have suffered catastrophic damage or complete collapse… with an empty gift from Santa nearby.
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