So the Coke ad is on TV... ITS OFFICIALLY CHRISTMAS!! guff yea!
Has anyone started their Christmas shopping yet? When I was younger, before I was working I never done shopping really. I would have helped pick out presents, which was class, but in reality my parents bought each other stuff and just put our names on it. It was an arrangement which worked… they paid, I got thanked. Class. I haven’t started shopping yet. I’ve looked but I haven’t actually bought anything yet, that starts next week. I love Christmas shopping. I love Christmas. Everything about it. Best time of the year. I love the lights and the trees and the food and the music and the food and the presents and the food and the food and the food. It’s just amazing.
I used to love going to the shopping malls to see Santa. I used to get so excited queuing up, waiting in line, looking at the little cottage they set up just waiting my turn to go in and see the big man. Nothing better. Then you go in and this sexy young elf guides you into the room, and sitting there in his red suit, his big black boots and white beard, stroking his belly and chuckling away, is Santa. Wow. Do you ever wish you could just go back to doing that again?
Do you ever walk past grinning kids, sitting on Santa’s knee, wide eyed and hopeful and just think “I wish that was me?” I do, although I restrain myself ‘cus there’s something a bit creepy about a 24 year old guy sitting on Santa’s knee. Pity. However! Last year I did manage to meet Santa. Well I know it’s not the real Santa, I’m old enough to know how it works by now… it was his helper. But anyway, we went with a bunch of kids to this farm outside Ards where Santa sets up residence sometimes. There were real reindeers (which I got to feed!) and there was a forest and there was this amazing house with amazing decorations and Santa met us and we followed him down the lane to his house and went inside and sat down and he started to talk to us. And all of a sudden I knew everything was not as it should have been, for instead of a lovely, fat old man we got this creepy thin young fella with a speech impediment – “Fullo me intu my hoose” he said, “Run as fast as I can “ I thought.
Sure, it's really touching to see the little tykes telling their deepest desires to St. Nick, but consider the facts behind their faith:
“Around the globe, today, live approximately two billion children (persons under 18). Santa doesn't visit all of them, of course. Subtracting the number of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or Buddhist children reduces Santa's Christmas Eve workload to 15 percent of the total, or 378 million children (according to the Population Reference Bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, and presuming that there is at least one good child in each home, Santa must visit about 108 million homes.
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. That means that at each 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, and get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh, and get on to the next house.
For the purposes of our calculations, we will assume that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false). We're talking about a trip of 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. To cover that ground in 31 hours, Santa's sleigh moves at 650 miles per second--3,000 times the speed of sound. By 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 must carry over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. In air, even granting that the "flying" reindeer could pull 10 times the normal amount, the job can't be done with a mere eight or 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).
Six hundred thousand tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance--this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft reentering 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 miles per second in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 g's. 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.”
Far be it from me to try and disprove Santa, I in no way am trying to do that. I myself am a believer and am doing all I can to stay on the "nice list". All I am saying is that the so called facts and what we believe in our hearts dont necessarily add up... But that's the cool thing about kids; they don't have to have that all figured out. They just believe and that’s enough for them. As soon as they get older and start thinking that they know it all, their childlike faith in Santa gets burned up in their intellectual atmosphere.
I was talking to this girl a couple of weeks ago about Christmas. She was telling me how she sent her letter off to Santa and was so excited and it was amazing. She told me that Santa wrote back to her and even sent her some photos of some things she was asking for… apparently some people get special treatment. But it was amazing. She was so excited, so totally involved in her belief, so completely in love with this idea. It inspired me. Really it did. I was like “I wish I was this excited about my faith”. But that’s just the thing… we can be, more than that, we should be. Life with Jesus is exciting, is amazing, is challenging and sometimes doesn’t make sense. But that’s ok.
In Matthew 18:2-3, we have another scene with a child:
"Jesus called a small child over to him and put the child among them. Then he said, 'I assure you, unless you turn from your sins and become as little children, you will never get into the
What 'sins' was He talking about? One of the primary ones is the sin of "I put Jesus in the same category as Santa", thinking that we are too intelligent to believe or not believing because you can't figure it all out. You want to know something… your never going to have it figured out. But that’s ok. We need to put our hearts fully into Jesus and just trust that even though we can’t figure some stuff out that that’s ok, because He can. I love Christmas. Christmas reminds me to have a childlike faith, that even though I don’t have it all figured out, that’s ok, because God does. He sent us Jesus after all.
