This piece of Internet humor never gets old. Every holiday season I stumble upon it and crack up. Not sure where it originated. I’m sure I’ve had it for at least ten years.

1. No known species of reindeer can fly. But there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not completely rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.
2. There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. But since Santa doesn’t (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total – 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that’s 91.8 million homes. One presumes there’s at least one good child in each.
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 (which seems logical). 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. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.
   This means that 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 on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second – a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
4. The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized LEGO set(2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that “flying reindeer” (see point #1) could pull ten times the normal amount, 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. Again, for comparison – this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.
5. 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance – this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy. Per second. Each. 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. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion: if Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he’s dead now.

My wife and I are going to try an experiment this holiday season. We’re initiating a multi-year project to track the travels of a single bottle of party favor wine as it hops from party to party, host to host, forgotten cabinet to forgotten cabinet. How will we do this? GPS? RFID? Nah. Just gonna re-gift a bottle to a recipient who we know will play along and re-gift it to someone else, and on and on. A viticultural chain letter.

Since gift wine is almost universally crappy* it doesn’t get better with age and so, after a while, what gets shuffled in social circles is actually a container of steadily more noxious (and possibly dangerous, if consumed) liquid. A gift that depreciates in the giving.

What’s really interesting to ponder is the origin of a re-gifted bottle. Who actually starts the process? The quest to know is the equivalent of an epidemiologist searching for the origin of a mutant virus.

Also, can the re-gifted bottle jump the “holiday barrier” and enter the mainstream gifting community or — gasp — will it actually be consumed?

[*] An exception to this is the tier of really good wines that get shunted around. These bottles are re-gifted precisely because they are so good. Too good to drink yourself when they’d make a perfect re-gift. And thus the fine wines get finer in the same way that the re-gifted hooch gets hoochier.

This winter season if updates to this blog stop for an extended period you may plausibly attribute it to this cause: I have burned the house down. I really look forward to cold weather because I love building fires — stoking, proding, accelerating them. I had my cord of wood delivered in September when it was still 80 out. But, man, I screw up one out of every five fires. Usually I know why: too windy out, didn’t heat the flue up enough, ember torched the rug — that sort of thing. But there’s that one instance out of, say, ten when I can’t explain why the house is filling with smoke. Like tonight, when I had to scurry around ripping the smoke detectors from the ceiling. I did everything right. Might it have something to do with the fact that there are two fireplaces — one right below the other — that feed into the same chimney? Some sort of backdraft coming in through the other fireplace? Or something with starting a fire with a not-completely-burnt log from a prior fire? Perhaps the arsonist is just an idiot. Is that it?