Santa's consumption of sherry

[wellinghall]

This series of emails is about ten years old now. It started with the following contribution from yours truly ...

It is debatable how many Santa Clauses there really are. Let us take a middle view, and say one per country (taking, in our case, country to mean the United Kingdom).

There are 57.9 million people in the UK. If we assume that Santa visits children under 16, this is 21% of the total, giving 12.1 million children. However:
• parents will only leave out a glass of sherry where the children believe in Santa Claus (or pretend to, for their parents' sake); this would cut the age range down to 2 to 8, say, or 11% of the total, ie 6.4 million children
• further, parents not used to the Western milieu - eg recent immigrants from other cultures - will not leave anything for Santa, and nor will the very poorest families; this will bring the total down to, say 5.5 million children
• finally, in households with at least one child in the age range 2 to 8, there are probably on average 1.8 children in this age range in the household, giving 3.1 million visits.

So, Santa drinks 3.1 million glasses of sherry each Christmas. A small sherry glass might contain 50 ml of sherry, giving 155,000 litres, or 34,000 gallons! And all this in just 16 hours . . .


adaese's boss then kicked in with:

Given that alcohol is widely used as a fuel, as you should know there is a perfectly logical explanation for this, ie Santa's sleigh uses JATO (Jet Assisted Take Off) for departing each roof, which on a quick calculation of 2 children per household less a small deduction for blocks of flats gives 5.6 Million roofs @ a fuel consumption of 2.7cl per assisted take-off. The small surplus is accounted for by Rudolph, which explains why he has a red nose.


And one of adaese's colleagues added:

A plausible theory, but for one detail: Alcohol is indeed used as a fuel. However, sherry is a fortified Spanish wine containing a relatively small proportion of alcohol to water - about 20%. Santa would have to carry with him a portable still in order to turn the sherry into over-proof brandy. He could then use this to power his sleigh.

I don't think there is any mention at all in any of the Santa Claus traditions of any kind of bootleg liquor production in the back of the sleigh.


Another contribution from one of her colleagues:

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 (except maybe in Japan) 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 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, 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.

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).

600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates 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 mps in .001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,500 g. 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.

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


adaese then added this:

An interesting theory, but for one detail - Santa does not need to slow down for each house, as he simply throws the toys down the chimney while passing (this is why it's so important to hang your stocking by the chimney, so it will catch the present - a net would be even better, were it not for the danger of toys bouncing right back out again and braining the reindeer). He uses the reindeer antlers to sight with (like cross wires on guns) - that's why Santa needs so many deer to pull the sleigh.


And finally, an Australian actuary added this:

Report on the Economic Value of Santa & Co - By Grabrial & Partners (Actuarial Consultant)

We have been engaged by the Heaven Corp. to carry out a detailed appraisal of economic value of Santa & Co., a wholly owned subsidiary of Heaven Corp.
with the intention of a stock market listing in the South pole stock Exchange.

Approach
The approach in determine the economic value of Santa & Co. is to project the expected volume of sherry Santa may collect and the presents he may give out over the next 1000 years. The summary of the result is as follows:
Present value of future sherry stream 1 bil Crowns.
Present value of future presents give out. 1.2 bil Crowns
Current assets : Including sleigh and Randolph and colleagues (on current auction value) 0.1bil Crowns.

Assumptions:
We have assumed that Santa is able to sell the sherry on 1.2 Crowns with inflation of 5% pa.
We have also taken into the declining fertility rates of Christian in recent years into account. -.03% p.a.

Conclusion
The investigation reveals that Heaven & Co. may need to inject 0.5 bil Crowns to ensure Santa & Co. is viable as a separate trading company and to satisfy the capital adequacy requirement of the South Pole Stock Exchange. Alternatively, the sherry per family visited is to be increased by 5ml in future years.

Disclosure;
A fee of 5000 Crowns was levied in preparing this report.


(I think there might have been even more, but I haven't been able to trace it yet!)

Comments

[gramarye1971]

...I really, really want a glass of sherry right now.

[eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com]

ROFLOL! Pass the sherry, please.

[chainmailmaiden]

No mention of Santa being very bad, drinking & driving?

[hmmm-tea.livejournal.com]

3.1 million 50 cl glasses of Bristol Cream @ 17.5% abv (to pick a popular sweet sherry brand as an example), would give a total of 2,712,500 units of alcohol.

Assuming Santa is an average man in terms of alcohol absorption, these would give a blood alcohol concentration of around 54 kg (per 100ml of blood).

Not sure what the BAC limits are for riding a flying sledge, but they must be quite high.

[malaheed.livejournal.com]

No wonder he comes but once a year - he's sobering up for the whole year

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

"One hundred fifty-three and one-half per-cent alcohooooool..."

[didiusjulianus.livejournal.com]

I now need a glass of sherry too...and I didn't even get to the end of it. Too long! (she pleads).

[asklepia.livejournal.com]

But what about the elves? They work all year making the toys for santa to deliver, and do they get any sherry? Not likely. Typical Victorian capitalist set-up - the labourers do the work and the boss gets the perks. ;-)

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

I'm not entirely sure that 34,000 gallons of sheey in one night counts as a perk ... ;-)