The legend of Father Christmas comes from Saint Nicholas who lived in the 4th Century. The legend says that a poor man had three daughters but couldn’t afford to pay their dowries, so the girls couldn’t get married. One night St Nicolas threw a sack full of gold through the window - enough for the first daughter’s marriage. The second night the same thing happened and so the second daughter could get married. The third night, the window was shut and so St Nicolas dropped the sack down the chimney. The gold fell into a stocking that had been left out to dry – and that’s why many people leave stockings out for Santa Claus. There are many different stories about Santa from around the world. In Denmark he’s called Julemanden (Christmas Man) and in Finland, Joulupukki, which evolved from the words "Christmas Goat" . In Russia "Babouschka" is a grandmotherly figure who brings presents.

	Does Santa Really Exist?
	Follow our investigation, and see if you can work out how many reindeer Santa would need to deliver presents to everybody in the world…
	Here's a few things to think about.
	Let’s take the flying reindeer for a start. No known species of reindeer can fly, but then there are still hundreds of thousands of living organisms yet to be classified, so they can’t be completely ruled out.
	Even if Santa was only delivering presents in the UK he’s got his work cut out! If he has 12 hours to visit all 21 million homes in Britain and presuming that all homes are evenly spaced across the country at 0.06 miles apart. (Assuming a land area of 84550 square miles). Santa has to travel at a whopping 105,000 miles per hour, and that’s not allowing time for actually delivering the presents!
	And what about carrying all those presents? Even if we presume that each household has only one present of 1kg, the total weight would be 21 million kg. An ordinary reindeer can only pull 150kg, so he'd need 140,000 reindeer - a few more than in the stories! This increases the total weight to 42 million kg, not including Santa or the sleigh - which is almost as much as the Titanic weighed! 42 million kg moving at 105,000 miles per hour would need more than a billion Watts of power - that’s equivalent to the power produced by 2 million nuclear power stations. And we haven’t even considered the rest of the world!!
	So does Santa exist? It’s official… it must be magic.