True Story of Santa. Fun and Unsettling Santa facts

True Story of Santa. Fun and Unsettling Santa facts

Because of the Earth's rotation, Santa has 31 hours to deliver presents, assuming he travels from east to west. Researchers at the highly regarded, if unscientific, Spy magazine determined in 1990 that:

Santa's sleigh moves at 650 miles per second (3,000 times the speed of sound).
Even if kids get relatively lightweight gifts, like a two-pound box of Legos, the sleigh is very heavy, weighing about 321,300 tons. Santa would need 214,200 conventional reindeer to pull this size sleigh.

Add in Santa and all those reindeer, and the sleigh might weigh as much as 353,000 tons. Traveling at high speed, an object like this has massive air resistance. It's so much, in fact, that it's like what happens when a space ship reenters Earth's atmosphere. If it doesn't have a protective coating on it, it will burst into flames.

Spy concluded that Santa's reindeer would have made thundering sonic booms and then burst into flames almost instantaneously. They also said Santa himself would have been pinned to the back of the sleigh with a centrifugal force 17,500.06 times greater than gravity.

But this obviously hasn't happened. Christmas, and Santa, keep on coming. We can only conclude that they are either immune to the laws of physics or they all have on protective suits, not unlike the Space Shuttle and its astronauts.

The bottom line here is that Santa has managed to overcome a fairly shady past to achieve some magnificent feats.

Despite the fact that he's carrying some extra pounds--something that could easily happen to anyone who has endured centuries of scrutiny by the press and historians--he is able to travel much faster than the speed of sound.

We can really only hope that this generation of children behaves well enough, and appreciates Santa enough, to keep him on the straight and narrow. We've seen what happens when other celebrities fall off the wagon--or the sleigh, as the case may be.

That's something worth mentioning when you pass on this entirely true story to your favorite youngsters. Want to avoid the hurt of holidays past, and the sting of Black Peter's whip? It's up to you, kids. It's up to you.