Santa Spoiler Warning

It is a well established fact that once someone becomes a father he also becomes a veritable fountain of embarrassing crap jokes (in fact, I've heard talk that this could be used as an early indicator of pregnancy). We all develop an instinct for when a Dad joke is about to be told. Perhaps it is the way your father clears his throat, waiting for an appropriate moment to interject with his witticism. Whilst eating at the local Chinese restaurant, whenever questioned about his fortune cookie message, my father will reliably answer, "This insert has a protective coating". I have a theory about the production of Christmas Cracker jokes - I imagine Christmas Cracker factories where children with new haircuts, waiters dropping dishes and people wearing bad ties are paraded before father-son pairs and the ensuing monologue is recorded. The child's embarrassment levels are measured, via electrodes attached to the forehead, to test for quality assurance.

The internet must be like prospecting for gold for most fathers. My father subscribes to a number of mailing lists, which run hot with Santa jokes in the weeks preceding Christmas. This leads to the eternal conflict every father must continuously face: to protect the sacred innocence of the childhood myth of Santa, or to tell the Dad Joke? As an aside, I'm a little confused about the whole Santa thing. A phenomenon I've noticed for myself, which I can only presume extends to others, is a reverse in the direction of the Santa myth. Originally intended as a story parents will tell their children, it seems to me that Santa is a pretence that children will hold for their parents sake. I remember feeling very embarrassed for my parents whenever I became aware of a transparency in the Santa myth. For example, when I noticed that my parents were becoming careless in the hiding of the Santa presents, I'd attempt to hide them better, by putting something over them. Perhaps this is something particular to being an eldest child, (i.e. protecting the younger siblings). I asked my 11 year old brother the other day what he thought about the whole Santa thing. He answered that it depended on who was asking, because if it was our parents the answer would be that he was a believer. His logic was that as long as he continued the pretence of naivety then he'd continue to cash in on the extra presents (talk about mixed messages). I recall the Christmas that my father had the Santa discussion with me. The motive behind this advent was a little confused, as not only did I stop receiving presents from Santa, my father started sharing his internet Santa jokes with me (actually, they were probably BBS jokes, as this was before the internet). I recall the joke that my father shared with me on this occasion, probably because of it's aptness, as it was about the scientific impossibilities of Santa. I was unable to find the original publication (which, to the best of my knowledge, was, the now defunct, Spy Magazine), but found numerous reproductions across the internet. Here it is reproduced, yet again:

Is there a Santa Claus?

Consider the following:

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.

Anybody else have any Dad Jokes they care to share?