How Many Employees Would Santa Need on Christmas Eve?

What do I wish for this Christmas? Other than more time in the day to get things done, I'd love to have a couple extra arms, think octopus. I'm the mom of a very active little boy who is getting himself into everything all of the time and most days I can't keep up.

I totally can't lie. I'm jealous of  Santa. I mean, year after year he manages to pull off a crazy deadline without a hitch. I can't even go to the grocery store without forgetting one main ingredient. Santa is able to be in multiple places at once and he never drops the ball, unlike this mom. But here's the thing- what if Santa didn't have Christmas magic? What if he needed the backing of an entire organization to keep him organized, on time, and able to get everything delivered by midnight on Christmas Eve?

According to NPR, the people at FedEx and UPS asked this same question and after crunching the numbers, they found that in all reality, Santa would need 12 million employees to pull off his Christmas Eve present delivery.

An estimated 760 million children worldwide celebrate Christmas, and Santa has to get to each of them in only 24 hours. If you do the math, that adds up to about 9,000 deliveries a second or out 760 million pounds of cargo which would fill up 300 big airplanes. Like, 747 big.

Santa would also need 46 international distribution centers with 400,000 elves just to load up his massive sleigh. He'd need another 832,000 elves to manage logistics, support, and human resources.

But wait, there's more! Santa would need 40,000 elves dedicated solely to dealing with customs regulations and another 67,000 elves to get their hands on flyover rights, flight schedule, and flight plans. He'd need 100 meteorologists to keep him in the loop as to the weather, and an additional 10 million elves to make sure that presents ended up in the right distribution center.

[via NPR]