On Dasher, On Dancer - Who’s Really Pulling Santa’s Sleigh?

It's Cats I tell you!

Del the Reindeer cat

Well, since we all know that Santa Claus is real *cough*... It is going to have to be reindeer. I base my findings on the fact that caribou have 1 more syllable than reindeer making it hard to fit into the 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer'. Caribou would ruin the song! But I am still open-minded. Who knows?

This has been a crazy year for me and Christmas! First, I found out that the holiday may have some interesting origins; now, it seems as though Rudolph was probably a caribou!

I agree with Jaxy in that they might've used "reindeer" because it was catchier for song purposes, but the facts presented above are pretty intriguing. It's fascinating what you find out when you start to dig deeper... even if it changes everything you thought you knew about a holiday.

Great blog! Oh, and I love the cartoon too.

Great cartoon. I'll bet that's the one with the shiny nose.

Not sure if they're reindeer or caribou, but I'll take these guys.

The original post suggests 8-9 reindeer (including Rudolph who only came on the scene in the mid-1940's). Now we have "Olive, the other reindeer" too. Maybe she's doing Olive the remaining work of pulling the sleigh.

I bet that Johnny walker is pulling your sleigh Merry xXx - mas! (bah Humbug)

Here's a fun read ; "Can Reindeer Fly ? - The Science of Christmas" by Roger Highfield, ISBN 0-75381-366-1

(The Lapp people know of fly agaric, it emerges from the body as muscimol, and what hard working beast would say no to a warm drink on a cold day. It can pass thru several bodies and still be active.......)

Well the reindeer all have to be female because male reindeer loose their antlers in the fall, whereas female reindeer loose theirs in the beginning of spring.

Interesting theory - probably right. Same thing happens with caribou.

Many of the names sound more like they belong to females than males - Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Blixen (I know someone who had a female Great Dane named Blix). Hmm... this is something else to think about!

Subject: Santa from an engineer's viewpoint

I'm sure many of you have seen this before, but in the spirit of the season, enjoy!

Merry Christmas!

There are approximately two billion children in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist 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, this comes to 108 million homes, presuming 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 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 stocking, 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 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.

The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming 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 can pull 10 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). A mass of nearly 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 adsorb 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 miles/second in .001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,000 g's. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim considering all the high-calorie snacks he must have consumed over the years) 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.

What reasoning are you applying to an assumption that Santa does not visit Hindu, Jewish, or Buddhist children? Not visiting these regions of the country simply for religious reasons would make Santa a bigot. Are you saying that Santa is a bigot? is that what you are implying?

Engineers in my experiance, tend to be narrow minded and are locked into paradigm thinking. Think out side the box. Haven't you ever heard of entanglement? The Santa theorem goes beyond triple entanglement by a factor of 10000. So you see it is possible for Santa to accomplish delivery in much less than thirty one hours as he simply is beyond time. If we were in a room called time with two doors, we could move into the next room called notime then return to the other room called time through either door. One door taking us back to the time we left and the other door to what ever would be the present time in the room.

That was way to deep for my pea brain, Rand. Santa is magic. Well thought out on your part. Welcome to the wacky world of CR4. Are there any other people on the face of the planet that ponder this stuff? GA 2 U.

"Think out side the box."

There's a box? What box. I don't see a box. To me a box is something to bring me cool stuff I ordered online, or that Santa brought me on Christmas morning. Then I can cut it up, and make a fort, and play with more than the toys that came in it. Boxes are fun.

Everyone always ignore the edges and corners of the box. It's like sitting on a fence - hurts your nads, but you can see both sides

You still haven't noticed that I know your ears ! If I go walkies over x-mas I may take a picture !

Have a good 'un Bricky

According to religious believe God is everywhere so why can't santa do the same, anyway sanata is a nonlocal quantum particle

To quote the Jolly old Elf, "On Dasher, on Dancer, on Prancer and Vixen, on Comet, on Cupid, on Donner and Blitzen, to the top of the porch, to the top of the wall, now dash away, dash away, dash away all!"

Rudolph is only called in for severe weather, and Olive is an intern.

A Merry Christmas; (Christians) Happy Chanuka; (Jews) and Joyous Yuletide, (Wiccan Pagans)

Best regards Dragon

Christmas brings only good memories to mind. Feast or famine the Spirit of the season makes one warm and fuzzy. It's a time when hearts and hearths are open.

Merry Christmas everyone.

May your days be merry and bright.

HO! HO! HO!

What's that up in the sky?

Oh my god, it can't be. Yes it is. Santa!

The sleigh is pulled by reindeer because they produce more methane than do the caribu. This was proved by a research grant from the United Nations on global warming in the North Pole.

I suspect that Rudolph is really a monkey in a reindeer costume. Why? Because he came from Monkey Wards.

He was invented as an advertising gimic for Montgomery Wards (a US department store chain... now in department store heaven). We always referred to it as "Monkey Wards".

Bill