With deliveries hotting up in the run up to Christmas, and the level of service expected by customers at an all time high, Delivery Quote Compare takes a look at the busiest delivery company on earth and asks the important question on everyone’s lips; How does Santa Claus deliver presents to every child on the planet in just one night?!
First of all, we need to work out a few numbers. There are approximately 2 billion children on the planet. However, as part of the Christmas tradition, we must assume Santa only brings presents to children in Christian families. That leaves about 35% of worldwide households and the number of children at a staggering 700,000,000. Rounding up the average number of children per household to three, we can assume Santa needs to make 233,000,000 stops – that is a lot of mince pies!
If we assume these 233,000,000 stops are spread out evenly across the planet, and that the surface area of the planet is approximately 510,000,000km, then each stop will be about 1.47km apart. This makes the total distance that Santa has to travel around 342,510,000km.
Assuming that Santa works from east to west in order to maximise the amount of night time available to him, it should give him around 32 hours to deliver all his presents. This would require him to travel at a speed of 10,703,437.5km per hour, or around 1,800 miles per second. To put this in perspective, the speed of sound is around 0.211 miles per second, and the fastest moving man-made object in history is the space probe Voyager 1 which manages a paltry 10.8 miles per second. And this is all assuming Santa is dropping presents down chimneys without stopping or taking a toilet break!
And if your head doesn’t hurt after all those numbers, it would if you had to consume the amount of alcohol that Father Christmas does – if the average 50ml glass of sherry makes for around one unit of alcohol, the 233,000,000 units Santa drinks would put him around 50 million times over the legal driving limit!