Pretty sure thermodynamics would be an issue using the traditional method.
I do, however, have to take issue with some of the maths involved.
Even the starting number of children is disputed. Pitpass starts with 378 million, and for the purposes of the rest of this post I'll follow that figure. However, Time states there are 526 million children (despite using an age cut-off of 14, which is unrealistic).
Any Christian on the Julian calendar would not receive presents on December 25, but on January 6. That accounts for around 90 million children.
Christians in large parts of continental Europe, as well as South America, have their present-opening on December 24. That's about 150 million more children (assuming a third of each have the presents on December 25).
At that point, Santa "only" needs to visit about 148 million children at the end of Christmas Eve (which is about the same number as he'd visit the previous day).
Using the Pitpass figure of 3.5 children per house, this gives 42.28 million houses that could be visited by Santa.
However, misbehaving children and non-believers in Santa are not evenly distributed. I'm going to suggest 10% of households only have badly-behaved children, or children who don't believe in Santa even though their parents do*. The lump of coal or big bag of nothing is traditionally delivered by another being. This reduces the total households to 37.86 million.
* - Possibly a variation, like the one my parents told me - this had Santa co-ordinate present purchases with my parents, and then on the night, pass the presents to my parents for them to put in the pillowcases in exchange for a big bag of carrots for the reindeer.
Pitpass also assumed that the drop had to be made on the stroke of midnight. This is not the custom across the whole UK, let alone across the world. I for one remember being sent to bed at 8:30 pm to make sure I didn't see Santa park by the wood pile, implying he could have visited as soon as 9 pm.
NORAD Santa Tracker states that it is between 9 pm and midnight in most countries. For that matter, the way timezones work mean that apart from the last timezone, Santa can take nearly an hour to complete his work before it causes problems further along. He'd even be able to do some deliveries to the west of the USA, Canada and the eastern Pacific after this, because children rarely wake up before 4 am on Christmas Day.
So Santa has 38 hours to deliver to 37.86 million households. Just under 1 million households an hour.
Is this any more achievable?
I'm going to ignore most of what is said about how Santa does individual deliveries, as that's really specific to a certain British version of how Santa works and I suspect the majority of Santa-believers' version is at least slightly different.
Also, none of it changes that Santa has to visit 278 households a second. This is about as long for Santa to visit each house as it does for a top F1 driver to react to the starting lights of a F1 race. Santa would barely have time to notice he'd stopped before he was running late. By the time he'd done a single movement to throw out the presents, accept anything in response and then leave, he'd have taken 4 houses' worth of time simply to pay enough attention to do the actions (without considering how much time the actions would actually take - remember Santa typically takes more care over his presents than simply flinging the presents over the fence would imply).
At least, not if Santa's following the same rules of time as the rest of us.
NORAD reckons Santa actually takes days, weeks, possibly months to do the deliveries. This is appealing on several levels:
- it explains why Christmas is once per year and not more often (if Santa's just spent 3 months of his year doing an evening's worth of deliveries, he's probably not going to want to repeat the whole thing just because Wizzard sang "I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day")
- it gives Santa time to deliver presents properly
- it means Santa and his reindeer can enjoy and digest all their gifts without getting indigestion (hence why antacids and painkillers aren't on the list of items traditionally left out for Santa)
- it gives their bodies time to convert the food into useful energy and muscle repairs, not simply convert to fat - all helpful for keeping deliveries on schedule and to avoid Santa having to cancel due to sickness
- exiting the space-time continuum explains how Santa is able to reliably avoid being seen by small children specifically
- G-forces (as well as thermodynamic build-up) aren't a problem, since there's effectively infinite time to dissipate both
- it explains how deliveries work in places with really bad flying conditions (skyscrapers built close together, areas with tunnels, fog, warzones…)
- it means there only need to be a small number of parcels in the sleigh when it's flying (since Santa can simply shift position in the continuum when wanting to re-load), making it feasible for 9 reindeer to pull with less magic than inherent to the idea of a flying sleigh. There would be flights because reindeer would want to exercise after a certain number of houses and, with space-time continuum shifting, this can be indulged to everyone's content (within reason - being spotted doing so at 5 am due to timezone confusion might be awkward).
- the fact a reindeer can only travel at 15 miles per hour becomes irrelevant
- it's still possible for mishaps to occur (such as the notorious times Santa got stuck in a chimney and Grandma got run over by a reindeer) and still make the schedule work.
Does this help?
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