Santa in the age of terrorism

“Christ­mas is a sea­son for kin­dling the fire for hos­pi­tal­ity in the hall, the genial flame of char­ity in the heart.”

— Wash­ing­ton Irving

“Christ­mas is not a time nor a sea­son, but a state of mind. To cher­ish peace and good­will, to be plen­teous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas.”

— Calvin Coolidge

It ain’t easy being St. Nick. To begin with, Santa has all the prob­lems he’s always had. He has to man­age a team of fly­ing rein­deer. He has to feed, clothe and employ an untold num­ber of elves. He has to make toys for chil­dren all around the world, while also keep­ing track of whether they have behaved them­selves or not, despite the fact that it’s not clear exactly how the naughty or nice scale oper­ates. Then, on top of all of that, he has only 24 hours to deliver every sin­gle one of those presents across a planet nearly 25,000 miles around.

To make mat­ters worse, the num­ber of chil­dren on the planet has sky­rock­eted. World pop­u­la­tion didn’t hit two bil­lion until about 1920 and now it’s around seven bil­lion. That’s a pretty big increase in work for a guy who’s sev­eral cen­turies old. As if that wasn’t bad enough, now he has to deal with a world that is on edge about ter­ror­ism and patrolled by stealth air­craft, satel­lite imagery and unmanned drones.

For­tu­nately, there are peo­ple look­ing out for the right jolly old elf. Take, for exam­ple, Geor­gia Com­mis­sioner of Agri­cul­ture Gary W. Black. Com­mis­sioner Black was appar­ently aware that Santa would be trav­el­ing with live­stock. Review­ing rou­tine paper­work, Com­mis­sioner Black came across an appli­ca­tion filed by an S. Claus request­ing per­mis­sion to bring nine hoofed ani­mals into the Peach State. The appli­ca­tion even spec­i­fied their names — Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Don­ner, Blitzen and Rudolph.

Unfor­tu­nately, the appli­ca­tion did not include state iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. Lab­o­ra­tory test­ing and cer­tifi­cates of vet­eri­nary inspec­tion were also miss­ing. Appar­ently unsure of how to pro­ceed, Com­mis­sioner Black said he con­sulted the state vet­eri­nar­ian and was assured that the ani­mals posed no dan­ger of bring­ing dis­eases into the local ani­mal pop­u­la­tion “the rein­deer will be mov­ing quickly, will only prance and paw on rooftops and will not inter­min­gle with any live­stock.” He also noted that “Mr. Claus pre­sented impec­ca­ble records.”

There is, how­ever, no word from the Fed­eral Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion on whether they’ll be mak­ing sim­i­lar excep­tions to laws gov­ern­ing fed­eral air­space. After all, Santa will need to be mov­ing at sev­eral hun­dred miles per sec­ond over the United States and will be pass­ing over sev­eral restricted areas.

A group of law stu­dents at Suf­folk Uni­ver­sity have even com­pleted a guide on how to sue Santa for vio­la­tions of air­space reg­u­la­tions, speed­ing, park­ing vio­la­tions, tres­pass­ing, theft, tax eva­sion and use of non-domesticated ani­mals. (Appar­ently, they hadn’t heard from Com­mis­sioner Black yet.)

For­tu­nately for Saint Nick, the North Amer­i­can Aero­space Defense Com­mand has tracked Santa for years and seems to be just fine with his being in U.S. air­space. Santa has also been given a big thumbs up by the Supreme Court as being appro­pri­ate in pub­lic dis­plays that also include Christ­mas trees, nativ­ity scenes and “Sea­sons Greet­ings” banners.

I can’t speak to the physics of Santa mak­ing it around the world (nor the logis­tics of his entire oper­a­tion) but it would appear that his flight through the United States has cleared the nec­es­sary legal hur­dles so that every­one can have a very Merry Christmas.

David Hej­manowski is a mag­is­trate and court admin­is­tra­tor at the Delaware County Juve­nile Court and a for­mer assis­tant pros­e­cut­ing attorney.

Posted by Dave Hejmanowski on Dec 23 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.