Weird facts about Santa Claus

According to tradition, Santa's reindeer will eat 360 different plants, but not carrots. In June 1995, a New Zealand Santa Claus was sentenced to six months’ detention for breaking the security glass at a petrol station the previous Christmas when they would not give him a free ice cream.

Another achievement by Santa the same year was the award of his personal postal code by the Canadian post office.

Letters addressed to Santa Claus at the North Pole would be sped on their way if they carried the postal code HOH OHO, officials of Canada Post promised.

In 1995 there was a great dispute at the 32nd World Santa Claus Conference in Copenhagen.

The Finnish Santa, who claims to be the only true one, refused to attend unless the others acknowledges his uniqueness.

‘This is the last straw’, an organiser of the Conference said:

‘We had invited the Finnish Santa to attend and explain himself at this year's conference. Now we're going to strip him of his white beard and red robe and excommunicate him once and for all.’

In 1927, a Finnish radio programme pinpointed Santa's location on Lapland's Karvatunturi, or ‘Ear Mountain'.

The area resembles a rabbit's ears, from which Santa can hear if children are being naughty or nice.

In 1998, a man appeared in court in Finland for driving his car into a reindeer-drawn Santa sleigh.

Although he was drunk, the jury recommended leniency on the grounds of his understandable surprise.

In Great Yarmouth, England, in 2000, a street trader dressed as Santa was arrested for brawling.

A police spokesman said, ‘It was extremely upsetting for the young children to see Santa being nicked and handcuffed.’

In 2001 a Mother Christmas sued a store in America for $100,000 because she was sacked for having breasts.

In the same year, two banks in Switzerland banned entry to anyone in Santa Claus costume for fear of robberies.

Two recent research studies throw light on the phenomenon of children's belief in Santa Claus.

In 2002, the Canadian Medical Association Journal published a paper called 'Do Reindeer and Children know Something that we Don't? Pediatric Inpatients’ Belief in Santa Claus’, in which Claude Cyr reports the results of interviews with 45 children and their parents.

His results show that there is no difference between girls’ and boys’ belief in Santa, but that belief decreases with age. Santa-belief is, however, directly proportional to the age at which their parents stopped believing in him.

The author admits that the study has many limitations, including its timing (late April 2002) which, he says, 'might overestimate the rate of belief in the Easter bunny and underestimate the rate of belief in Santa.’

The second, more recently study is even less encouraging for Santa.

At Christmas 2003. John Trinkaus observed and classified, on a six-point scale, the expressions on the faces of 300 children as they visited Santa in department stores in New York.

Of the 300:

one (0.3 per cent) was 'exhilarated’
two (0.7 per cent) were 'happy’

247 (82 per cent) were 'indifferent’
47 (16 per cent) were 'hesitant’
none (0 per cent) was sad
and three (1 per cent) were 'terrified.’

It has been calculated that Santa would need 200,000 reindeer flying at 200,000 times the speed of sound in order to deliver presents to every child on earth.

-F.T.I.