Santa has 31 hours of Christmas
to work with, thanks to the different time zones
and the rotation of the earth, assuming he
travels east to west (which seem logical). This
works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to
say that for each household with good children,
Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out
of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the
stockings, distribute the remaining presents
under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been
left, get back up the chimney, get back into the
sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming
that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly
distributed around the
earth (which, of course, we know to be false but
for the purposes of our calculations we will
accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per
household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles,
not counting stops to do what most of us must do
at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and
etc. This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at
650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of
sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest
man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space
probe, moves at a pokey 27.4 miles per second -
a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles
per hour.
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