YES, SANTA CLAUS, there is a Virginia. And a Horace or three, and a whole raft of Janes and Johns and Jacks and about three billion other assorted ankle-biters and rug rats. They greedily await you, all quite prepared to turn you into dog barf and Rudolph into MacDeer burgers if you fail to cough up their particular over-priced trinket of the year.

I exaggerate. There are a number of societies which for some reason don't buy into the notion of a pot-belllied, bearded old geezer being dragged across the heavens by what look like skinny cows with coat racks, to pop down chimneys - never mind the roaring fires below - and drop off largesse for no good reason to a bunch of spotty and pre-spotty kids on time-out from slicing up car tires.

Once the progeny of these civilized groupings are omitted from Santa's list of calls, he is left - and this is according to an organization called the Population Reference Bureau - with only about 378 million teen and sub-teen wretches to cater to. This assumes that of an average 3.5 children per household, at least one has been good.

(You might also wish to assume that Easter bunnies lay eggs, Al Gore once had an original thought and Monica Lewinsky doesn't pass out flavored cigars. Oh, strike that last; one never knows.)

S. Claus Esq. probably has the only job that makes employment as a parking meter warden or cleaning elephant latrines appear appealing by contrast. Figure it this way: thanks to the different time zones and the earth's rotation, and assuming he travels east to west, old Red Drawers has 31 hours of Christmas to get his work done.

That comes out - and for the mathematics I am indebted to the students and teachers at the Welford and Wickham Primary School in West Berkshire, England (global address: 51 degrees 39 minutes north - 1 degree 27 minutes west) - to 822.6 visits per second.

In other words, he has 1/1,000th of a second to park the sleigh on a dodgy roof (assuming the traffic warden has gone), dive down a chimney that is probably six sizes too small (or seven or eight if he had baked beans for lunch), load up a bunch of smelly socks, drop presents under the tree, somehow get back up the chimney and dash and dance and prance and blitzen and rudolph off to the next warren of urchins.

For this is gets paid off, at best, with a slab of cold pie, a glass of milk that had the cat gagging six hours earlier, and if lucky - or perhaps not - a glass of Uncle Mortimer's chigger and linseed oil wine (vintage 4:30 p.m. Friday last). No wonder he doesn't hang about - the green apple quickstep must be an ever-present occupational hazard.

America's best scientists still haven't quite got the knack of landing machinery on Mars rather than three or four miles in it. Yet the lads and lassies at the Welford and Wickham have calculated that Santa is making pinpoint landings every thousandth of a second while zipping along at about 3,000 times the speed of sound.

Not bad for a fat little codger powered only by eight reindeer internal digestive engines. And if you figure that each kid gets presents weighing no more than a couple of pounds, the sleigh has to be hauling about 353,430 tons - roughly four times that of the liner Queen Elizabeth II, or 11 times the national debt of Upper Volta (before tax).

You want job pressures? I'll give you job pressures. That sort of bulk encountering air resistance would flatten old Santa in his sleigh seat under 4,315,015 pounds of force. At least, he wouldn't need a seat belt. An air bag about the size of the Hindenburg might be useful, though.

Supposedly, Santa got trapped into this annual lark about 16 centuries ago, when he was still plain old St. Nicholas and operating as a bishop in what is now Turkey. Obviously touched by some ancient Asian form of mental aberration, he took to lobbing bags of gold through windows to help spinsters accumulate a dowry to get married.

Except one night one of the gal's fathers caught him at it. St. Nick begged him to cool it, but pop blabbed anyway, and the beleaguered saint got stuck with the task of doling out presents to the worthy and worthless alike, century after century, ad infinitum. So much for good intentions, with which the path to a much warmer clime is well and truly paved.

Why Claus keeps at it baffles me. I would not be at all surprised someday to catch a glimpse of some poor sod in a tatty red suit with white trim down at the unemployment office desperately seeking something marginally more respectable, like sewage sweeper, prison executioner or divorce lawyer. Or in a real pinch, U.S. senator or serial arsonist.

My bet is that Santa will continue to grit his teeth and go on trying, year after year, to please the unpleasable that are children. But if you must lay out a spread for his consumption, a Chateau Margeaux 73 would not go amiss.

Thought for the Week: The only time the world beats a path to your door is when you're in the bathroom.

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