How fast does Santa travel to deliver Christmas gifts?

First off, given that this is being published on December 25th, Merry Christmas!

Now, one of the best places you can track Santa's progress as he zips through the skies is through the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the group that the rest of the year tracks whether the enemy has launched missiles and is trying to attack us or not. I imagine that their Santa tracking duty is a much appreciated break from the stressful job they usually do.

This year it appears that NORAD and Google Maps are working together on the NoradSanta.org site, actually.

Which is good, because if you just go to Google Maps and search for "Santa Claus", you'll be surprised at what you find:

Who knew there was a Santa Claus, Georgia?

Instead, let's use the NORAD Santa Tracker. Prior to Dec 25, here's what the NORAD Santa Tracker looks like:

During Christmas eve/Christmas, however, it updates with a map that looks like this:

Every "gift" icon represents a place where Santa has dropped one or more gifts. Got it? Basically, it shows that Santa tracks the sun, starting with the time zones that first are going to move from Christmas Eve to Christmas morning, then those later as he goes along. In other words, he starts his deliveries in New Zealand and ends with Hawaii. Good planning, that, I bet he has a nice condo on the beachfront in Maui!

Plugged in to Twitter? Then you should already be following me at @DaveTaylor but more entertainingly, you can also follow Santa's progress at @NoradSanta too! Here's what it reported at about 11pm MST:

But How Fast Does Santa Travel?

Now about that speed question. Well, that's a bit more sticky because we have to make a lot of assumptions. But let's do so. Let's presume that there are an even 2 billion children 17 and younger on Earth and that only 15% celebrate Christmas / expect a present or two from Santa. That's 397 million kids. Now let's assume that, on average, across the world, there are 3.5 children per household.

Do the math and that gives us 108 million homes that Santa has to visit. Since it's just a few days past winter solstice let's assume that there are 12 hours of darkness between sunset Christmas Eve and sunrise Christmas day, shall we? Now, adjust for time zone shifts, and that gives us 24 + 12 = 36 hours for his deliveries.

Now we can calculate out: Santa then has 129,600 (36*60*60) seconds for his deliveries and has to make it to 108,000,000 homes. That's 833 deliveries/second, which is pretty darn impressive for the old guy. Then again, we can figure that dropping down the chimney, filling the stockings, sticking presents under the tree and whooshing up to the rooftop again takes, what, 30 seconds minimum? That suggests that there might well be 24,900 (833*30) Santa clones helping the jolly old guy out on the job. Or a lot of elves, maybe?

Now what we haven't calculated is the average distance between houses and the travel time involved in visiting 108 million homes in 36 hours. There's no doubt it's quite impressive and indeed, is likely greater than the speed of light, which begins to explain how Santa might well pull things off: if he's traveling faster that the speed of light, well, maybe he's messing with time shifts and actually has figured out how to maximize his delivery window?

Let's run with that and assume that he can't spend more than a year on the job, however his time/space warp might be fashioned, otherwise he'd be delivering next year's presents while still delivering the tail end of this year's presents too. That hurts my brain and likely would leave Rudolph and his brethren completely in the dust. Let's also generously give him a day or two off, so let's say he spends 300 days delivering presents. 300 days = 300 * 24 * 60 * 60 = 25,920,000 seconds.

Now we might get this to work. 108,000,000 / 25,920,000 = 4.1 houses/second.

So what do you think? Have we figured out the secret of Santa's amazing delivery schedule? That it's not about linear time but rather his ability to tap into a space/time distortion field related to his ability to travel faster than the speed of light, and thereby giving himself weeks, months to deliver presents, even though we on Earth perceive it as all happening within a tiny, one night window?

Maybe. Maybe not.

Either way, I'll say one thing: however he pulls it off, Santa is a long-standing tradition, a representation of all that is generous and good in our culture. Whether he's down your chimney, dropping off your presents, and onto the next house in a fraction of a second or not, I know he'll agree with me on this one most basic wish for all of you reading this entry: