The Math of Christmas Eve.

  I found it!  I found an article where someone looked at how many children,Santa has to visit on Christmas Eve so each and everyone gets a present.

The author explained where he got his numbers and what criteria he used for selecting numbers.  For instance he looked for the number of christian children aged fourteen and under.  he found there were 526,000,000 who celebrate Christmas on December 25th.

So if one assumes you have 24 time zones Santa has to travel through beginning late on the 24th so the gifts are there for the children in the morning, the author calculated Santa has to deliver 22 million presents each hour.   This breaks down to 365,000 children per minute or 6,100 children per second.

In addition, there are some wonderful graphs for students to practice reading.  One of the graphs breaks down the population according to time zones while the other looks at areas with the 22 million children in a time zone.  The two graphs compliment each other

Then towards the bottom, there is a short slide show discussing which country or countries are the most populous in each time zone, its population of children, and how long it should take Santa to deliver the presents.

Furthermore, at the bottom of the article, the author takes time to list issues which might effect the actual numbers such as not all Christians celebrate Christmas such as Jehovah's Witnesses and some non-Christians do celebrate it so that might change the numbers a bit.

There are also issues where certain countries cover several time zones which makes calculating things a bit tougher.  I really liked the article because the author really takes time to break it all down.  It is well written and worth using in class because its something you can assign to students to read and if you provide an accompanying worksheet with questions for students to answer.

Check it out.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great Christmas.