Things About Holiday Characters Only Adults Notice

Santa's workshop must be massive. If the Atlantic's analysis is correct, there are roughly 526 million kids on Santa's list, and if each one of those kids gets three gifts from Santa, that's about 1.58 billion gifts that have to be handcrafted through elf labor. Let's say an elf can make three gifts a day — then, working five days a week, 50 weeks a year, each elf will make 750 gifts annually. So to meet that 1.58 billion production goal, Santa needs more than 2.1 million elves on his payroll.

So what's the deal with all those elves? Do they get a fair wage? Comfortable housing? Three meals a day? How does Santa deal with overcrowding? And if the elves are getting paid, where does Santa get the money?

Pacific Standard speculates that Santa may own some kind of cookie enterprise, after all, if each one of those 263 million homes (assuming two kids per home) leaves three cookies, that means he'll have an inventory of 789 million cookies to resell, which at 50 cents a cookie could conceivably bring in a net profit of $394.5 million. If that money went directly to payroll, that means each elf earns roughly $187.26 a year, plus room and board. That's not slavery exactly, but still, if you're an elf and your goal is to one day own a home and a nice investment portfolio, a career at the North Pole doesn't sound very lucrative.

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