How many cookies and how many glasses of milk does Santa drink on Christmas Eve? He would have to get a stomach ache. — True-Believer, El Centro
A sweet little girl asked us this question, and it seemed like a great one for such a fine Christmas day.
We imagine poor ol’ Santa Claus must be sleeping off one heck of a cookie hangover this morning. Intestinal distress is a gift that will keep on giving for a least a couple of weeks.
And if he’s lactose intolerant, well forget about it. Mrs. Claus will have him sleeping out in the reindeer pens till the spring thaw.
Short of writing Santa a letter and asking him how many cookies he ate and how much milk he drank last night, we’re forced to work off assumptions. Such information isn’t the type of random, meticulous facts kept by the Census Bureau or Guinness Book.
It occurred to us that letters to Santa might be a good frame of reference. And lo and behold, after enlisting the elves Google and Yahoo!, those cute little things, we found our frame.
Apparently there was a study conducted by the Universal Postal Union in 2007 in an attempt to put a number to the sheer volume of letters being sent to the North Pole from nations around the globe.
Wouldn’t it go to figure that the United States would be the one country who wouldn’t give up its numbers to the UPU? But other sources estimate that more than 1 million letters are generated each year from the United States.
In 2006 (the data year the UPU was dealing with), France had the most, with 1.22 million, but that was because France was processing Santa’s correspondence from Russia and other countries.
Germany had 500,000; Australia, 117,000; Austria, 6,000; Bulgaria, 500; Canada, 1.06 million; Spain, 232,000; Finland, 750,000; Ireland, 100,000; New Zealand, 110,000; Portugal, 255,000; Poland, 3,000; Slovakia, 85,000; Sweden, 150,000; Switzerland, 17,863; Ukraine, 5,019, and United Kingdom, 750,000.
That’s a grand total of roughly 6,361,382 letters to Santa around the world in 2006 among roughly 30 countries.
We can’t imagine there is a way to account for duplicates, kids that didn’t send letters but put out cookies and milk, or any of those other variables. The biggest wrench we see in this math is the fact that while a home may have five kids and five letters to Santa, that wouldn’t mean five plates of cookies and five glasses of milk.
That said, we’ll have our Yuletide cheer with a big round number of 4.5 million households that would put out milk and cookies for Santa.
That might not be right, either. Our intrepid scout elves found that the milk and cookies tradition, while having deep roots in the German tradition of hanging thin, wafer-like cookies from their “tannenbaum,” the United States and Canada are the big milk-and-cookie countries.
The Brits and Aussies tend to leave something out that will make jolly St. Nick even jollier and in need of a designated deer driver — a glass of sherry or beer and a mincemeat pie. In Ireland, it might be a pint of Guinness with a figgy pudding. Rice porridge is on the midnight menu for countries like Norway and Sweden.
So, if we’re strictly dealing with milk and cookies, we might be looking at 1 million to 1.5 million households. If we’re asking about things to eat and drink, than we can use the 4.5 million figure.
Now, what merry multipliers do we factor in? Three cookies per plate sounds like a good average, as does a cup of milk (or 8 fluid ounces) per home.
For North America, we might be looking at 3 million to 4.5 million cookies eaten last night. For milk, that’s 1 million to 1.5 million cups, or better yet, 8 million to 12 million fluid ounces of the white stuff.
Goodies in general all over the world? Let’s suppose two pieces of food per house and the same as North America for fluids.
That very well could have been 9 million pieces of international cuisine last night and 36 million ounces of milk, stout, sherry or whatever you got.
All this merry math is making our tummy ache, much like Santa right about now.
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