Oaklin Christmas Card 2023

If you are on this page, you are almost certainly wondering how we calculated the lighthearted statistics that explain Santa's operational challenge in our Oaklin Christmas Card this year.

We love analysis, but we also understand the importance of setting out both method and findings. For the inquisitive, or perhaps sceptical, this is how we calculated it:

• The process began by researching the total number of households in the world = 2,166,016,619

• We obtained this from a helpful Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_households

• We took the view that households with 1 occupier or less were, on the whole, unlikely to receive a visit from Santa this year. We discounted them from his list, which left Santa with 1,837,033,459 houses to visit.

• The next step was to account for the variance between naughty and nice children, accommodating how that variance would affect Santa’s list. We concluded that households with consistently naughty children would not receive a present this year.

• Consulting as many parents in the office as possible, we formulated an assumption that 10% of children would have been so consistently naughty as to warrant being excluded from a visit. 183,703,346 households were affected, leaving the total of Santa visits at 1,654,089,354.

• Santa only has 24 hours to deliver all the presents if they are to be opened on Christmas day. For the purposes of the exercise, it was not possible to model the distribution of households by each individual time zone, so we simply divided the total number of households by the number of hours available, as a proxy for Santa’s distributed challenge. We further divided that figure by 60, the number of minutes in an hour, and reached the conclusion that in order to reach every household, he would have to deliver presents down every chimney at the rate of 1,148,673 per minute.

• The analyst team were greatly puzzled by the question of how many houses in the world actually have chimneys and what Santa does when there isn’t a chimney to grant him access to Christmas stockings. This begged further questions about houses with security systems and local adverse weather conditions. Further analysis of these important questions will follow during festive periods soon.

Merry Christmas from everyone at Oaklin - we hope you enjoyed this light hearted seasonal analysis as much as we did.