Does Father Christmas use self storage?

One of the most mysterious things about Father Christmas is where he stores all his presents. After all, it would be quite easy to find him if there were billions of packages piled up in front of his house, or if he owned the only distribution centre in Lapland. The fact no one sees his presents during the year suggests he’s found a low-profile storage solution.

Self storage is an obvious possibility. It would enable him to store the presents in strategic locations around the world, ready for him to collect when he is pressed for time on Christmas Day itself, and the large parking bays would be perfect for flying his sleigh into.

As a special Christmas investigation, Storage.co.uk attempted to calculate how much storage space Father Christmas would need for all his presents, and how much it would cost.

How many presents would Father Christmas need storage for?

It is generally accepted that Father Christmas gives one present to every child on earth, regardless of their nationality, race or religion. Therefore, as the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates there to about 2.2 billion people under the age of eighteen living in the world, this would be the number of presents he has to produce and store.

While it is argued by some that he doesn’t give presents to naughty children, the number of children who actually receive gifts suggests he is a very lenient judge of their behaviour. Only a handful of the most diabolically evil under-18s don’t receive anything at all from him; as their number is hopefully very small, this factor has been excluded from the calculations.

How much self storage space would Father Christmas need?

This is not easy to work out, as of course different children receive different-sized presents. However we can use the size of a very popular toy as a global average.

If every child receives a Barbie doll or Action Man, the typical dimensions of each present would be about 15.2 x 6 x 32.4 cm, as this is the size (including packaging) of the Barbie ‘I can be a snowboarder’ figure that is on sale this Christmas.

This means each one has a volume of 2955cm³. Multiplied by the 2.2 billion children on earth, the total volume of the presents Father Christmas has to store would be almost exactly 6.5 trillion cubic centimetres, which can be converted to 229,580,648 cubic feet.

A typical self storage unit in the UK is about 7 feet high. If, for the sake of argument, the average self storage unit has an area of about 100 sq ft, then this multiplies to give each one a volume of 700 cubic feet.

Therefore, if Father Christmas wanted to rent 100 sq ft-sized self storage units to keep all these presents in, he’d have to divide 229,580,648 by 700. The result would be the total number of storage units he’d have to rent: 327,972. Given that renting and moving belongings into one self storage unit is enough for most customers, such a busy man would obviously find this challenging.

How much would Father Christmas have to spend on self storage?

The combined floor area of all these self storage units, which is how rent would be worked out, would be 32,797,200 sq ft, as each one is 100 sq ft. Assuming he would want to keep all his presents in storage for the six months before Christmas – which is reasonable, although his elves would have to work very quickly to have them ready in time – the cost would obviously be quite high.

Big Yellow, according to their annual report, charges an average customer £13. 43 per square foot for six months. This is where things could get very expensive for Father Christmas, as 32,797,200 multiplied by 13.43 would produce a bill of just over £440 million, which may possibly be beyond his means.

Is self storage too ‘deer’ for Father Christmas?

The financial assets of Father Christmas are of course unknown. He is thought to live in Lapland, a province of Finland, where the GDP per person is about £22,600 per year. As there is no reason to suspect his income would be higher than average – he does, after all, give away all these presents for free – he probably isn’t well-off enough to afford this much spending on self storage.

Assuming he is a very old man – the American missile-defense agency NORAD, which tracks his movements ever year (http://www.noradsanta.org/), estimates him to be at least 16 centuries old – his income is in fact likely to be lower than average. This would be the case in Britain, as if he is 16 centuries old he would probably be categorized as an over-75 by the Office of National Statistics, giving him an average income of £564 per week, as long as he and Mrs Claus are actually married and not simply co-habiting.

Given that this money would already have to feed Father Christmas, Mrs Claus, all the elves and a team of flying reindeer, not to mention maintenance and upkeep for the sleigh, it is likely he couldn’t afford to spend £440 million each year on self storage, even if this would be the most convenient option for him.

Not self storage after all

On balance it is probably quite unlikely that Father Christmas uses self storage, chiefly for financial reasons. There would also be problems with size – as the number of square feet he needs, 32.8 million, is above the combined capacity of all the SSA UK members – and he could also fall foul of regulations. Most self storage companies only allow humans on to the premises and into units, meaning his elves probably wouldn’t be allowed to help him unpack, and he may have trouble with the flying deer too.

Where Father Christmas keeps his presents before he delivers them seems set to remain a mystery, but with the number of the children in the world constantly increasing, the growing pile can’t be getting any easier for him to conceal.

2 Responses to “Does Father Christmas use self storage?”

1. Storitz says:

   December 23, 2010 at 6:50 pm

   Maybe he doesn’t use it for gift purposes, but what about for his personal needs? http://blog.storitz.com/2010/12/8-things-santa-should-put-in-storage/

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   May 2, 2012 at 2:07 am

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