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The Real Problem with Rudolph
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer has been taking it on the chin from oh-so-important SJW types. Their arguments are ridiculous, of course. But Rudolph is problematic. The current kerfuffle caused me to dig out this blog post I wrote a few years back. I stand by it.
I’m not a Grinch. Really. I’m not. I love Christmas, both for its religious significance and its pervasive cultural presence. Lights, decorations and goodies. What’s not to love?
But I do have a few quibbles. I don’t like to hear Christmas carols in October, and I’ve made my position clear that Thanksgiving should not be observed amid Santas, elves on or off the shelf, angels or creches.
And I don’t like Rudolph. Does that make me a bad person? Sorry. Rudolph is an upstart, and he has shoved that red nose right to the center of the celebration. Rudolph first appeared in 1939—the same year Hitler invaded Poland. Coincidence?
Unlike the Fuhrer, who blew across Europe with the speed of lightning to achieve his dream of world domination, Rudolph held back, planning and plotting, no doubt. Which one is the genius now?
Maybe the canny reindeer just felt the need to wait for the World War to blow over before implementing his own blitzkrieg. His beginnings were humble, first showing up in a promotion for the department store Montgomery Ward. Yes, Virginia, Rudolph started his career as a shill for a retailer. His creator retrieved the copyright for the reindeer’s hard-luck tale and published a children’s book in 1947.
Then came the master stroke—lyrics and a tune were written promoting Rudolph. Cowboy songster Gene Autry recorded it, and the song was the smash hit of 1949 (the same year Mao took control of China. Coincidence?). That cheesy song is second only to White Christmas in the holiday hit parade.
Rudolph is definitely a latecomer to the holiday lore. Santa Claus was practically invented by Clement Clark Moore in the poem A Visit From St. Nicholas, published in 1823. I’m sure visions of sugar plums danced in my head when I was a child, even though then and now, I wouldn’t know a sugar plum if I choked on one.
Mr. Moore is the undisputed expert on the jolly old elf. And how many reindeer does he say pull the airborne sleigh? Eight! Eight, tiny reindeer. That’s it. Yet every present-day depiction of Santa’s flight includes that mid-20th-century interloper. Donder, Blitzen and the gang have been reduced to also-rans.
Rudolph has achieved his dream of Christmas domination. For now. But what goes around, comes around. Someday there may be a Hubert, the blue-eyed reindeer, with a feel-good story and a knack for promotion, who will kick Rudy right out of the harness.
Reindeer games. What’s not to love?
Published in General
You wanna be careful posting…you’ll shoot your eye out…
Fixed it for you.
Surely he must be in cahoots with the little drummer boy. Psy Ops to soften ’em up.
I consider Rudolph’s nose to be like the development of radar in the run-up to World War II — a necessary modernization to help Santa avoid possible collisions in low-visibility situations.
Now, if someone adds a reindeer with built-in GPS navigation, that’s taking it just a little too far….
No doubt!
“The story of Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer was written in 1939 by Robert L. May, a copywriter for the Chicago-based Montgomery Ward department stores, as a promotional gift for the store’s customers. The stores had bought and distributed coloring books every Christmas and saw writing their own story as a way to save money. Montgomery Ward distributed 2.4 million copies of the Rudolph booklet in 1939.”
Nothing to do with Hitler or the war or anything else of that nature. Implying that it does is sad. The writer was a small, timid lad, and picked on for his smallness. Having been shoved into an orphanage at age of 7 in 1945, I also identified with Rudolph. And I loved cowboys and horses, so the song gave me hope. I already knew Santa was a myth as did most kids. We identified with Rudolph.
As a practicing hands on type of engineer for the last 40 years this is my take on the whole Santa and Reindeer Mythology…
There are approximatley two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist (except maybe in Japan) religions, this reduces the workland for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 379 million (according to the population reference bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per houshold, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming there at least one good child in each. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the assuming east to the west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000 th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stocking, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat what ever snack that have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get onto the next house. Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evently distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will except for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second–3, 000 times the speed of sound. For purpose of comparison, the fastest man made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour. The pay load of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than medium sized LEGO set (2 pounds) the sleigh is carrying over 500,000 tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the “flying” reindeer can pull 10 times the normal amount, the job can’t be done with eight or even nine of them—Santa would need 360, 000 reindeer. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54, 000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch). A mass of nearly 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance – this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst in to flames almost instantaneously, exposing the riendeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized in 4.26 thousands of a second, or right about the time that Sant reaches the 5th house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 mph in 0.001 seconds, would be a subject to acceleration forces of 17,000 gs. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim considering the high calorie snacks he must have consumed over the years) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he’s dead now…..
Or Magic.
Or, he is a Time Lord. A TARDIS makes a Santa job easy.
Someone took it upon themselves to remove 2/3 of my post. so be it.
Well there is Leroy the Redneck Reindeer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIdnYAkqSes
Is that what happened to Leroy Jenkins?
??? Who dat?
Did it involve Gene Autry?
This guy:
Suspira, you should change your name to Olive.
You know, Olive the other reindeer, who used to laugh and call him names.
Hahaha Suspira! You are hilarious!
I would have expected SJWs to consider Rudolph their Christmas Prince – born different, teased mercilessly, rises when the Big Guy realizes his oh so special gift and leads all his bullies at the head of the team (a spot reserved for alphas a.la. dog sledding).
That sounds so SJW LGBTQAAP, doesn’t it?
And that red nose thing? Is he a communist?
You know, when I shared this exact same joke a few years ago, I was attacked for trying to destroy the magic of Christmas:
http://ricochet.com/67800/archives/the-physics-of-santa-claus/
Indeed it did.
A man is sent to prison for the first time.
The first night there, after the lights in the cell block are turned off, he immediately sees his cellmate going over to the bars and yelling, “twelve!”The whole cell block breaks out laughing. A few minutes later, somebody else in the cell block yells, “four!” Again, the whole cell block breaks out laughing. “Why are you guys just yelling numbers?” He asks his cellmate. “What’s so funny about random numbers?”
“Well,” says the older prisoner, “They’re not random. It’s just that we’ve all been in this here prison for so long, we all know all the same jokes. So after a while we just started giving them numbers and yelling those numbers is enough to remind us of the joke instead of telling it.”
Wanting to fit in, the new prisoner walks up to the bars and yells, “SIX!” But instead of laughter, a dead silence falls on the cell block. He turns to the older prisoner, “What’s wrong? Why didn’t I get any laughs?”
“You didn’t tell it right.”
Welcome to Prison Ricochet dear…..
Language warning
Also, I think this is relevant:
At the end of the Macy’s Day Parade, Santa Claus says, “Ho ho ho.” And next weekend you start putting up Christmas lights.
Well it’s most likely that Santa’s sack of toys is a bag of holding.
A bag of holding fused with Heward’s HandyHaversack because santa can get any toy he wants to without having to dig around.