Your chimney is not just for smoke this Christmas!
December 1, 2020
As you get set for the festive season with plenty of Dawson’s coal and yule logs for the fire, don’t forget that there will be someone else who wants to use your chimney on Christmas Eve. Santa Claus has been dropping down the chimney for almost two thousand years bringing presents and spreading Christmas cheer, but where did he come from, and how does he pull off the mother of all delivery rounds every year?
Santa comes from Turkey!
You really couldn’t make it up; Santa, or Saint Nick as he was known then, actually started life in Turkey in the 3rd century – the country, not the Christmas dinner. Over the years, the legend has developed across Europe, including a Santa who threw coins through windows at children as they slept. Eventually, as people started to seal their doors and windows against the cold, Santa had no choice but to use the chimney as his only way in, and he’s stuck with it (and occasionally got stuck in it!).
Over the years, the boring puritans wanted to replace our jolly, generous Santa with the Kristkindt, who went from house to house testing kids on religious knowledge. Lucky for us, our fat festive friend survived.
Surprisingly, despite 1800 years of ho-ho-history, the Santa we all know today, dressed in his famous red suit, is not the stuff of legend, but rather the stuff of a 1930s advertising campaign for Coca Cola. Before that he was generally depicted wearing green.
Santa’s magic
If you doubt the magic of Santa Claus, you just have to look at the numbers.
His total delivery round has been estimated at 212,030,000 miles, visiting 378 million kids in around 150 million homes. Even gaining time by flying west, he still only has 32 hours maximum in which to make the trip, which means he has to travel at 640 miles per second and visit 1,300 homes every tick of the clock.
So unless he can land, slide down the chimney, deliver the presents, eat the mince pie, drink the sherry, get back out again and take off in just 0.00077 of a second, he simply has to be magic.
And that’s before you consider 150 million mince pies and glasses of sherry he has to consume en route. At 46 billion calories, that’s like eating a Big Mac every second for over 70 years.
Good thing he has his elves to make his toys, because even at just £10 per sack, he’d have to spend more than Amazon makes in a year.
Yule fuel
As a leading fuel supplier, the one secret we’d love to know at Dawson’s is how Santa’ manages his fuel bills. To get round all the good boys and girls as fast as he needs to, scientists reckon Santa would need to burn around 1,400 trillion gigajoules of energy. That’s more that double the annual fuel consumption of the whole world, and with five sacks of coal producing just one gigajoule, it’s way beyond even Dawson’s impressive stocks.
Whatever festive magic the big man uses, we hope he brings you and yours a very merry Christmas. Hope you have a fabulous festive season by the fire and enjoy a warm and cosy New Year, from all the team at Dawson’s.
