A NASA Physicist was interviewed as part of a TV documentary on the history of Christmas traditions. In the interview he was questioned on the practicality of Santa visiting all the children of the world in one night. He had quite an interesting answer using scientific data to explain his claim.

If Santa started at 7:00 pm at the date line, which is mid Pacific Ocean, and traveled east he could maintain the 7:00 pm time zone as he traveled around the world. This would be taking advantage of the time difference going backward as he traveled in that direction. A simple example would be traveling from New York to Los Angeles gains the traveler 3 hours. Of course Santa is traveling much faster than a plane. He described Santa's speed as much faster than the Space Shuttle.