Sermon Illustrations
Expert Calculates Santa's Christmas Eve Workload
Some people will have a stressful load this Christmas season. Take Santa, for instance. Phillip Bump, a technology writer for The Atlantic, has attempted to provide a tongue-in-cheek answer to an important question: what exactly is Santa's yearly workload? Bump calculated the number of Christian children in the world and the geographic distribution of those children around the globe. After factoring in all the nuances of time zones, distance between houses, and how many children live in each house, Bump shared his conclusions about Santa's yearly task:
[Based on CIA estimates] there are just over 526,000,000 Christian kids under the age of 14 in the world who celebrate Christmas on December 25th. In other words, Santa has to deliver presents to almost 22 million kids an hour, every hour, on the night before Christmas. That's about 365,000 kids a minute; about 6,100 a second.
Bump mentions a few caveats: not all Christians celebrate Christmas on December 25th, the CIA's data isn't always up-to-date, and some non-Christians celebrate Christmas too. But all in all, Santa has an enormous job to do! He has to serve over a billion kids in one night as he pulls a huge sleigh with nine reindeer, while he tries to avoid being detected and shot down by the North America Aerospace Defense Command—and don't forget that one of his reindeer has a very shiny nose.
Preaching Angles: (1) Stress, Pressure, Anxiety at Christmas—Say something like this: "Santa isn't the only one who experiences stress during this season. Some of you feel like getting ready for Christmas is an enormous, super-human job." (2) The Lordship of Christ—Of course a Santa-figure can't possibly be a universal savior and gift-giver, but Jesus truly is.