Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, but...

There are approximately two billion children in the world, but since Santa does not visit Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist offspring, the workload for Christmas night is 15% of the total, or 378 million, and at an average rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that 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, which works out to 967.7 visits per second – or for each Christian household with a good child, 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 stops is evenly distributed, we’re 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 or 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, so assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized 2-pound Lego set, the sleigh is carrying more than 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. 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), and 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, creating deafening sonic booms and vaporizing the entire team 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 mps in .001 seconds, would be subjected to a centrifugal force of 17,500 gs, meaning that a 250-pound Santa would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds, instantly reducing him to a jolly old quivering blob of pinkish goo.

Therefore, dear Virginia, if Santa ever did exist -- he’s long dead now.