To ensure that all the presents make it under the Christmas tree in time, the Christ Child has to visit 68 children in Switzerland every second. (archive picture)
Keystone
Santa Claus under stress: In order to visit all the children in Switzerland on Christmas Eve, the Christ Child has to make it to 68 children every second.
According to data from the Federal Statistical Office, 976,103 children up to the age of ten live in Switzerland. As we all know, many are waiting for the big moment on December 24: bells ring, doors open, presents are there.
Fortunately, not all families handle the time of gift delivery in the same way – but the Christ Child will probably have to manage to deliver the countless presents in a time window of around four hours.
According to calculations by Keystone-SDA, he would have to deliver presents to 68 children every second. So it’s no wonder that no one has ever really seen it – anyone traveling that fast can’t possibly pose for photos. But how fast does the Christ Child really have to be?
Traveling at supersonic speed
To find out, we would need to know how many kilometers the Christ Child travels. In reality, the Christ Child probably flies directly from house to house. But since we don’t know exactly how many children live where, an approximation helps: the Swiss road network with its 85,151 kilometers. It densely covers the country, connects practically every inhabited area and is therefore a realistic indicator of the distances that the Christ Child would have to cover if he wanted to get from door to door.
If this distance is reduced to the available time window of four hours, the result is a travel speed of around 21,290 kilometers per hour. The Christ Child is therefore traveling around 23 times faster than a modern passenger plane above the clouds and almost 17 times faster than sound.