Fairies & Fantasies

For the first time in my life, I am proudly displaying multiple personas. So far, I have acted as the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and soon, I will have to be a fairy, the Tooth Fairy.

I look forward to being the tooth fairy because it allows a lot of room for creative freedom. As a parent, there aren’t many constraints in the Tooth Fairy fantasy. Most importantly, there is no commercialism in the drama. There are never commercial advertisements; there are no Tooth Fairy helpers, and no magical animals helping to place the lost teeth under the pillow. It may be our last, pure, un-commercialized, fantasy holiday. I also get to dress anyway I choose when I play the Tooth Fairy.

But it is now Christmas time. As the proud owner of a hyper-active five-year-old, I have been barraged with a flurry of questions about the science of Santa. “Daddy, why is he fat?” she asks. “Because he eats all the cookies little girls leave for him”, I answer. Won’t the fire burn him up in the chimney? she asks. “No, he’s magic like Harry Potter”, I answer.

I do wonder what kind of answers parents provided in the pre-Harry Potter days.

One such parent, Dudley Herschback, performed a detailed analysis of the act of Santa going up and down the chimney. “Italian scientist Galileo Galilei examined the motion of bodies falling under the constant acceleration of gravity. Based upon Galileo’s results, Santa's descent would take about 1.4 seconds at 30 MPH”.

Nice. I’ll bet he has well-adjusted kids.

Another set of research, The Science of Santa provides an analytical view of the physics behind the Santa phenomena. “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 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.”

I hope no-one starts to over-analyze the Tooth Fairy.

Merry Christmas!