Is There a Santa Claus?

1. No known species of reindeer can fly, but there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified (while most of these are insects and germs) this does not completely rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen. Also since scientists are still discovering new species all the time and still exploring the Artic area, there could be reindeer up in the North Pole area that no one has seen before.

2. There are over 2 billion children, people under the 18 in the world. But since Santa doesn't seem to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children. With those numbers, it probably reduces his workload by a minimum of 15%, which is about 400 million.

3. Santa has 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. This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. (Santa's sleigh would have to be moving at 650 miles per second which is 3,000 times the speed of sound.)

4. The payload on the sleigh adds another element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set at about 2 pounds, the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not including Santa Claus, which for the aspect of this is at a unknown "large" weight (using every story we have heard.) On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" could pull about 10 times the normal anount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload not even counting the weight of the sleigh, to 353,430 tons.

5. 353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enourmous air resistance. This will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecrafts re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy, per second. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity.

OR: It is just magic, probably the most simple answer to explain Santa Claus!

((Several of these facts came from SPY Magazine- January 1990 issue.))