a lill' s'thing for the hopefuls.... 
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.
There are two billion children (persons under 1
in the world. BUT since Santa doesn't appear to handle
the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the
workload to 15% of the total 378 million according to Population
Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per
household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least
one good child in each.
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 (which, of course, we know
to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will
accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total
trip of 75½ million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us
must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and 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 man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves
at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run,
tops, 15 miles per hour.
If every one of the 91.8 million homes with good children were to
put out a single chocolate chip cookie and an 8 ounce glass of 2%
milk, the total calories (needless to say other vitamins and
minerals) would be approximately 225 calories (100 for the cookie,
give or take, and 125 for the milk, give or take). Multiplying the
number of calories per house by the number of homes (225 x 91.8 x
1000000), we get the total number of calories Santa consumes that
night, which is 20,655,000,000 calories. To break it down further,
1 pound is equal to 3500 calories. Dividing our total number of
calories by the number of calories in a pound (20655000000/3500)
and we get the number of pounds Santa gains, 5901428.6, which is
2950.7 tons.
The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element.
Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego
set (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" (see above) 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.
353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air
resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as
spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of
reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second.
Each.
In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously,
exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms
in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within
4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected
to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A
250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously 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.
