25th December 2013 - Christmas Day

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate and Happy Festive Season to all those who have other things to celebrate ...

Twinkle Version...

Another gift from Google is the Christmas tree duly decorated yesterday....
Now glistens in a mysterious way..

A slightly different way to celebrate Christmas - which may be white ....
Christmas Eve was white - though through hail rather than snow...

Goose I believe is the order of the day.... yum !!Which brings me to the subject of Christmas... and some little known facts...

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.  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 we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household, a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding 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 manmade vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at 27.4 miles per second. A conventional reindeer can run up to 15 miles per hour.
    
3. The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized Lego set (2lb), 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 300lb. 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 cruise liner.
    
4. 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second, 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy, centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity, 4,315,015 pounds if force. Normal Santas and normal reindeer would be vaporised instantly. But I will let the Christmas spirit continue, we all know how strong Santa and his reindeer are. Of course we still believe in Father Christmas.
    
5. The world's most expensive bauble was £82,000.
    
6. We will buy eight million real Christmas trees this year.
    
7. We will eat 19,000 tons of Turkey.
    
8. We will eat 120,000 tons of potatoes, 1,200 tons of parsnips, and 7.5 million carrots.
    
9. We will consume 40,000 tons of clementines and satsumas.
    
10. 16 million packets of stuffing will be purchased.
     
11. We will get through 175 million mince pies, this would stretch 3,262 miles high, equivalent to 600 times the height of Everest.
     
12. And last but not least we will be subjected to 15 million tons of brussels sprouts, you will be delighted to know that equates to approximately 15 per person.

Have a good Yule ( and ignore the Sprouts - No-one Likes Sprouts they just pretend to !!)