Santa’s Miracle, Uncovered!

I have decided to find an explanation for the greatest Christmas miracle of all! And there are so many to choose from -from a Virgin birth to the fact that the two who didn’t bring gold are still thought of as wise (why?)…and yet singling one out is easy! Think about it, what can possibly come close to this: Santa visits every single address in the world in one night!

Simply amazing! This issue has so perplexed me that I have spent hours trawling through my library in search of a satisfactory solution… and at last I’ve found one (a miracle in itself) and, in a manic festive spirit, dare to share it with all of you!

To begin with let us ask a simple question: how much time does Santa actually have? This seems blindingly obvious – of course he has from dusk on Christmas Eve to dawn on Christmas day! All well and good, but it is easy to overlook the fact that length of day depends on latitude.

Clearly his task is more difficult in the Southern Hemisphere, but luckily only 12% of the world’s population reside there. We could, to be lazy (hey, it’s Christmas!) just work with the average length of night, which is about 12 hours.

One obvious trick is with the Time Zones: Santa could ensure that he commenced operation “Winter Joy” about 1nm west of the International Date Line and by arranging that his net westward velocity was ~1000mph he would move around the globe with the night, effectively doubling the hours of darkness available to him.

So, with our “average” length of day and the fact that the world turns, we can actually allow Santa a full 24 hours of darkness… his miracle doesn’t seem so great now does it! But let us not be sparing in our sense of awe, these tricks, though undoubtedly a great help, still leave Santa an awful lot of ground to cover in 24 hours.

Let’s guesstimate just how much ground we are talking about: if the population of the world is about 6.7 billion, and the average size of a household about 6. This means that Santa would need to visit ~1.12 billion homes in 24 hours, nearly 13′000 per second… even with the extra 12 hours granted by the earth’s rotation this is still pretty impressive and we would be remiss if we failed to show him some respect for this feat!