The 12 Geeks of Christmas, Part 3-Santa
There is perhaps no stronger early childhood memory than that of coming downstairs on Christmas morning to behold a treasure of wrapped gifts under the Christmas tree, larger by at least an order of magnitude than the anemic pile of boxes and packages placed there the night before by family members. There, staring you in the face, clear and incontrovertible proof that the stories repeated to you for weeks by parents, teachers, and of course, the sacred altar and guiding light, the television, are true.
It’s been a long time, but I recall that the ability to understand the story of Santa flying all over the world in a single night to deliver presents to good little boys and girls arrives almost in tandem with ability to doubt it. It’s those toddler years when you start asking Mom and Dad questions like, “how does Santa fit down the chimney?” and “does he really travel all over the world in a single night?” and “where does he get his elves?” Parental answers are vague, but reassuring–”I don’t know, but he does it!”
Some kids of a certain age simply accepted the story on faith, but the future geeks like me still weren’t sure. Assurances from teachers and aunties were fine, but even then I didn’t regard such sources as terribly scientific. But once on Christmas Eve, Mom and Dad played the annual radio bulletin from NORAD that a fast-moving unidentified craft has been spotted leaving the North Pole, apparently powered by nine flying reindeer. The cold-war era Santa-spotting coming from Cheyenne Mountain, the hardened military base at the center of an ever-vigilant global network on the lookout for Soviet ICBMs coming over the North pole, seemed to be a highly credible source for information verifying the truth of this Santa business. The Air Force was a bunch of no-nonsense guys–I mean c’mon, these guys flew jets. Plus it was a friendly reminder that Santa wasn’t going to be making any stops at any commie worker’s collectives in Omsk or Vladivostok.
So I do recall the feeling that morning seeing the pile of gifts that seemed to dwarf even the tree, thinking “Oh my god, it really is true! He really came!”
Now my Mom was not a geek–but I was. I can recall that even as I was opening gifts marked “From Santa,” I began to apply the kind of critical thinking and analysis to the forensic evidence Santa had left at the scene that is used by conspiracy theorists endlessly who pore over the Kennedy assassination. First, I applied graphology–I noticed an uncanny similarity between Santa’s handwriting and my Mom’s. Also, Mom and Santa used the exact same wrapping paper. The young FBI profiler in me noticed that in talking to other witnesses–my school classmates–it seemed that Santa applied a different MO at nearly every house. One particularly irksome observation is that while my Santa’s gift list included socks and underwear, and topped out his budget with a table hockey set, just a couple blocks away it seemed Santa had color TVs or new bicycles or minibikes to give away in a manner that at the very least cast doubt on Santa’s ability to discern the difference between naughty and nice.
Inevitable conclusions are of course inevitably reached. Yet even well into my teens, my Mom refused to give up the illusion, hinting only once that if we pushed her to admit her role in the conspiracy, than the game would be over–completely over. So we continued to go along with it in the spirit of enlightened self-interest.
Geeks continue to examine the mechanics of Santa’s trip–there are many variables, of course. How many kids are naughty, how fast must Santa go, how much time does he get at each stop. It’s examined in some amusing detail here in an article that originally appeared in Spy magazine.
The Spy article is fine, as far is goes, and while the article appears to be geeky, due to the added math, it falls short. A far more elegant and plausible explanation of the Santa phenomenon is here. In this case, quantum mechanics is applied to explain the apparently impossible flight of Santa.
Quantum Santa… now thats geeky.
Permalink | Trackback | del.icio.us Digg Reddit
Leave a comment
