This is Ashlyn yesterday during her kindergarten Christmas concert, looking sweet as Christmas cookies.

This is Ashlyn today, waiting for the bus on Polar Express Day. All the kids were told to wear their pajamas to school. The bed head became an accessory. I so wanted to comb that mess! (note: she did change her pajamas to be fresh and clean for school, in case you were wondering. I may have allowed the bed head, but there is no way I’d let her wear the pjs she wore to bed to school. There is a limit to the craziness.)

Our dream of a white Christmas may come true! We got 18″ of it yesterday!

A snow drift off our carport

Rosy cheeks post sledding across the street

1. No known species of reindeer can fly. Now, there are 300,000 species of organisms yet to be classified. 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 approximately 2 billion children (defined as persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not appear to handle Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or Buddhist children, that reduces the workload down to 15% of the original total – 378 million according to the Population Reference Bureau. At an average census rate of 3.5 children per household, that’s only 91.8 million homes. One may presume that there is 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. This works out to 822.6 visits per second. That 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 we know to be false but will accept for the purpose of these calculations), we are talking about .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 eating, etc. This means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 27.4 miles per second. A conventional reindeer can run 15 miles per hour at the most.
4. The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-size set of Lego building blocks (about two 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 exist (see point 1), can fly very quickly (see point 2), and can pull ten times the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight or even nine reindeer. We would need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload – not counting the weight of the sleigh – to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparision, this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth 2, the massive oceanliner.
5. 353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance. This would heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering 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 .00426 seconds. Santa, meanwhile, would be subjected to forces 17,500 times greater than normal gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems 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.

Before I get any hate mail, no, we didn’t read this to Evan in an effort to set him straight. We’ve taught them all it’s just a game, and I guess he wants to play the game this year. We’ll let him play it. We’ll just keep reminding him that he’s doing a good job playing the game. But, next time, I will make sure we change the station and listen to something infinitely more helpful than the Grandma/Reindeer song like the traffic report for the entire metro area.