Fact checks around Christmas

December 2025

Actually, we should not do this just before Christmas, but let us rationally analyze the story that Santa Claus would visit every household to bring presents.

The Netherlands, where I live, currently has 8.4 million domestic establishments. For simplicity's sake, assume that every family lives in a mid-terrace house with a typical plot size of 12×12 meters. Imagine all these homes side by side on both sides of one long street that would then stretch for a whopping 50,000 kilometers. Were Santa Claus to visit every home in a single day, his average speed would be some 2,100 kilometers per hour. The packages he tosses while riding would then be dangerous projectiles that would severely damage your property upon impact.

Of course, we do not all live in terraced houses; many of us live in apartments. The numbers above should therefore be considered an estimated upper bound. To estimate a lower bound, assume we all live in a single apartment building with 8.4 million floors, with a average floor height of 2.4 meters. Then Santa Claus would only have to travel about 20,000 kilometers to get from the ground floor to the roof, and to do that in a single day, he would have to ride at the speed of a regular airliner, around 830 kilometers per hour. Would we reduce the building's height by assuming, say, four apartments per floor, that would reduce to over 200 kilometers per hour. It remains advisable to dodge flying gifts.

Since a reindeer cannot be realistically expected to cover more than 160 kilometers in a single day, Santa Claus would need some thirty to three hundred helpers. I am afraid that the probability of Santa visiting you personally is therefore a few percent at best, but probably much lower than that. The same goes for Santa's Dutch colleague Sinterklaas, although his horse is somewhat slower than a reindeer.

I suggest you do not explain these calculations to your children. What would be fun, however, is to estimate where you would end up if every household decorated a Christmas tree, all of which would be laid out in a row after Epiphany. Since the typical Dutch Christmas tree stands 2 meters tall you would cover 16,800 kilometers, roughly from Amsterdam to Sydney, Australia. Santa Claus would need fifteen weeks to cover that distance we know now, but that is beside the point.

I have been told that when a string of Christmas lights is longer than a few meters, then mathematically the probability of tangling approaches certainty. Hence, it is not my fault that I spend a few hours each year desperately trying to untangle it all. But if we were to hang the recommended 10 meters of LED lights on every 2-meter-tall tree, we could circle the Earth twice with all those cords after the holidays. Such festive lighting must look quite cheerful from the Moon, if only we could find the necessary 8.4 million electrical outlets around the equator, that is about one every 5 meters.

Published in category Essays. More on Education.