It is stipulated that Santa Claus exists.

Further, that he spends the night of December 24th circling the globe in a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer. That he gains access to the homes of children that celebrate Christmas children, and that he gives them presents. And that he does this in the dark, unseen.

Granted, it seems... impractical. Over the course of one night, St. Nick has to stop by the home of every Christian child in the world. Of which there are a lot - an indeterminately large number of kids waiting for their gifts.

I decided to figure out how many, how big a task Mr. Claus faces as he races west across the face of the globe, staying ahead of the sun. And I did. Or, anyway, I came up with a pretty solid estimate.

The Methodology

What I wanted to figure out is this: how many Christian children live in each general area of the world. The region is important: where the kids live impacts the feasibility of the thing. If kids are distributed evenly, Santa has all night to reach everyone; if they live in the same place, he has about half as long.

It's impossible to find this information without considering countries; no one tracks demographics based on longitude. So, for every country in the world - of which there are a lot - I really needed to figure out the population broken down by age, religion and time zone.