Santa is an architect

It's drawing near to that time of the year again when thoughts turn to snow, presents, turkeys and all things festive. So it was that I was watching a program on TV yesterday where Santa was the main character and my 7 year old and I began to discuss the ways in which Santa manages to get presents to all of the good little girls and boys around the globe in a single night. Of course we covered all of the usual ideas, such as time dilation, wormholes and even time travel. My son thought that magic was the solution, but I pointed out that these days what with global warming and the fact that it's been shown that continual use of magic harms the environment, it's doubtful. Let's also not forget that magic reindeers produce a lot of CO2 as well as other effluent.

So where does that leave us (apart from with a rapidly disillusioned child)? The answer was obvious: although in the past he's probably used a combination of all of the above techniques (have to placate child), today he's taken a software architecture course and figured out that federation works well and scales. He has millions (billions?) of proxies in each country who do his work for them. He sends them information about what needs getting (in advance of course) and relies on them to buy the presents and distribute them locally. Those proxies may themselves have proxies in a recursive manner. Yes we all know it's the elves who build and distributed the toys to the shops, but it's the masses of proxies that get the delivery work done. And of course these helpers are parents, grand-parents etc.

So next time the question arises you'll know the answer: Santa is a coordinator and we're all interposed coordinators in the grand scheme of things ;-)