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Recently there was a debate-style posting in rec.humor.funny given a
Proposition: IS THERE A SANTA CLAUS? A friend of mine who I passed it
along to emailed me the note below and asked me to post it for him...

Rebuttal:
    Several key points are overlooked by this callous, amateurish "study."

1) Flying reindeer:  As is widely known (due to the excellent
historical documentary "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," the flying
reindeer are not a previously unknown species of reindeer, but were in
fact given the power of flight due to eating magic acorns.  As is
conclusively proven in "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" (a no punches
pulled look at life in Santa's village), this ability has bred true in
subsequent generations of reindeer - obviously the magic acorns
imprinted their power on a dominant gene sequence within the reindeer
DNA strand.

2) Number of households:  This figure overlooks two key facts.  First
of all, the first major schism in the Church split the Eastern
Churches, centered in Byzantium, from the Western, which remained
centered in Rome.  This occurred prior to the Gregorian correction to
the Julian calendar.  The Eastern churches (currently called Orthodox
Churches) do not recognize the Gregorian correction for liturgical
events, and their Christmas is as a result several days after the
Western Churches'.  Santa gets two shots at delivering toys.

Secondly, the figure of 3.5 children per household is based on the
gross demographic average, which includes households with no children
at all.  The number of children per household, when figured as an
average for households with children, would therefore have to be
adjusted upward.  Also, the largest single Christian denomination is
Roman Catholic, who, as we all know, breed like rabbits.  If you don't
believe me, ask my four brothers and two sisters - they'll back me up.
Due to the predominance of Catholics within Christian households, the
total number of households containing Christian children would have to
be adjusted downward to reflect the overloading of Catholics beyond a
standard deviation from the median.

Also, the assertion that each home would contain at least one good
child would be reasonable enough if there were in fact an even 3.5
children per household.  However, since the number of children per
household is distributed integrally, there are a significant number
(on the order of several million) of one child Christian households.
Even though only children are notoriously spoiled and therefore
disproportionately inclined towards being naughty, since it's the
holidays we'll be generous and give them a fifty-fifty chance of being
nice.  This removes one half of the single child households from
Santa's delivery schedule, which has already been reduced by the
removal of the Orthodox households from the first delivery run.

3) Santa's delivery run (speed, payload, etc.)
    These all suffer from the dubious supposition that there is only
one Santa Claus.  The name "Santa" is obviously either Spanish or
Italian, two ethnic groups which are both overwhelmingly Catholic.
The last name Claus suggests a joint German/Italian background.  His
beginnings, battling the Burgermeister Meisterburger, suggest he grew
up in Bavaria (also predominantly Catholic).  The Kaiser style helmets
of the Burgermeister's guards, coupled with the relative isolation of
the village, suggest that his youth was at the very beginning of
Prussian influence in Germany.  Thus, Santa and Mrs. Claus have been
together for well over one hundred years.  If you think that after a
hundred years of living at the North Pole with nights six months long
that they remain childless, you either don't know Catholics or are
unaware of the failure rate of the rhythm method.  There have
therefore been over five generations of Clauses, breeding like
Catholics for over one hundred years.  Since they are Catholic, their
exponential population increase would obviously have a gain higher
than the world population as a whole.  There have therefore been more
than enough new Santas to overcome the population increase of the
world.  So in fact, Santa has an easier time of it now than he did
when he first started out.

Santa dead, indeed - some people will twist any statistic to "prove"
their cynical theory.

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