How does Santa Claus work out the logistics of dropping off gifts year after year?

There is no reason not to believe that last night, a white bearded man in a red suit, tracked as usual by North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad), went zipping round the world in a reindeer-drawn sleigh dropping off appropriate presents into the stockings of kids who had been naughty and nice. To some, that would beg the question of how the logistics of such an operation is worked out year after year. Even if to keep costs manageable, Santa Claus decides to Make in India — as a handful of elves can hardly keep up with the increasing and varied list of gifts — there is still the question of how he knew who deserved what, in time to draw up production and delivery schedules.

There is cause for concern if, indeed, as leaked documents code-named The Snowman Files suggest, that the Rovaniemi Workshop tucked away in the Arctic Circle now uses a surveillance programme called Christal — even more advanced than the US National Security Agency’s Prism programme — to collect Santa bytes of behavioural data of kids. Even if the data is merely processed to determine the children’s eligibility for Christmas goodies, the privacy issues inherent in the revelations by Edward ‘Frosty’ Snowman — a silent observer if not a participant in these covert activities — cannot be ignored.