Mind blowing Christmas Statistics

It’s no secret that this time of year, Father Christmas is busy preparing for the 25th of December. With the delivery of no less than 1.9 billion presents in one evening to all children across the world, the odds are undeniably stacked against him.

We’ve delved into the most mind-blowing Christmas statistics to help us understand the numbers that go into the preparation for the big day.

Putting in the work

With nearly 2 billion presents to deliver, that’s a lot of Elf overtime to ensure every child gets a gift to open from Stan on Christmas morning.

On top of that, they’re made in the workshop and then gift-wrapped. If you assume 2 billion children, need to be catered for, here are the numbers:

• 1 toy from Father Christmas each.
• 364 working days.
• 16 hours a day.
• 4 toys per hour.

This would mean you need around 85,851 elves to meet demands.

The north pole must be a busy place. Image the housing crisis.

 Sleigh speed

That’s a lot of presents and a lot of homes he needs to get to.

According to University of Leicester students, Father Christmas would have:

• 715,000,000 Christian children to deliver gifts to, with an average of 3 children per house.
• Making him visit roughly 238,000,000 households.
• He would then have 12 hours to deliver these presents. With the variable time zones, he would be given an additional 25 hours to do his Christmas Eve run.
• Using those numbers, the Uni of Leicester students concluded that he would have to travel at a speed of 1.56 x 106 m/s. Which is 0.5% the speed of light.

We knew he’d have to move quickly to deliver all of his presents on time, but that’s impressive. How does he fit in the time to enjoy his snacks?

Snacking and drinking on the job

According to the numbers collected by Delish, approximately one billion cookies are left out around the world for Father Christmas, with about 500 million glasses of milk set out.

That would equate to 93,000,000,000 calories and to burn that sum of calories you would need to do 320,689,655 30-minute sessions with Joe Wicks. 

If you set out the traditional glass of sherry, that’s much booze for old St. Nick… may be a bit too much to consume when navigating the sleigh.

As you can see, there are many numbers to crunch in preparation for Christmas.