One traveller will be cranking up the air miles tonight, with some two billion house calls across almost 200 countries in 31 hours, including a bit of time-zone management. So what might he be toting to take the stress out of travelling?
Santa Nav GPS
Like sat nav but, well, different. Not so much “left at the next junction”, as “go west at the Cape of Good Hope and hit the juice”. With all 510 million sq km of the planet mapped out, chimney by chimney, and filtered against the naughty/nice database, he needs a hell of an SD card to store it all. Needless to say the military would love to get their hands on this, tapping in as it does to a mixture of ley lines, whale routing, pigeonware and post-it notes stuck to the sleigh’s dashboard. Even Amazon doesn’t seem to stock it.
Wrudolph Wradar Wrap-rounds
Things have moved on since a shiny, red nose, albeit a bright one, might be sufficient to navigate through fog, volcanic ash clouds or town on Christmas Eve. The reindeers undoubtedly use Wradar Wrap-rounds with full 4D (3D is so last century), 360-degree foggy-see-thru’ technology. That’s patent pending folks. These use amplified snifferology to detect the homes with best mince pies – carrots are fine for fibre but best not to be downwind of them after the reindeers’ first kilo or two.
The Kringlizer TimeMaster 2
Not-so-simple maths would tell you that traversing the world millions of times in a day, even with an extra few hours of time zone trickery is, well, stretching it. It's no mystery: Kris Kringle himself let the cat out of the bag in Miracle on 34th Streetwith some uncharacteristic loose talk. It's all about stretching time, where an hour becomes a year and so on. So obvious when you think about it and it's what they've been trying to recreate in the Large Hadron Collider under cover of searching for a doubtful-sounding subatomic particle. Higgs boson? Hah.
SantaSack Extreme Carry-on
Mr Claus’s vertically challenged assistants (got to be PC these days: it’s a sensitive issue) have their work cut out cramming it all in. Say two billion children who’ve been nice getting an average gift weighing 100g, it’s clear that in these days of severe luggage restrictions, Santa’s carry-on would be a fraction over. Hence he flies private. He favours an over-the-shoulder number, unstructured for easy of access. Given the difficulties some have finding a phone at the bottom of their handbag (or indeed, metro man bag), his SantaSack Extreme must have a self-search function that always leaves what’s needed at the top. But where to get one? Afraid you’ll just have to ask Santa and hope you were good. SantaSack Extreme also available in a coal-retentive model.