One of the most infamous questions related to time travel and Christmas is how does Santa visit all the children in the world in one night? Time zones give him a bit of help but at the end of the day, a form of time distortion has to take place for this to occur.
In 1994, 2002, and 2006, Tim Allen starred in the Santa Clause trilogy playing Scott Calvin/Santa Claus. The first and the last briefly touch on the franchise’s temporal theory.
In The Santa Clause, Neil asks Charlie how can one man deliver to all the children in the world. Charlie answers as a young kid would. First off, not everyone celebrates Christmas. Then he mentions some sort of space time continuum that breaks down once Santa is in the sleigh.
https://youtu.be/WlJgUXMbHDY&rel=0
That’s the most common and most probable theory.
There’s a loose mention of it in the third movie, The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause. Curtis makes a comment about how simple it is to manipulate the space/time continuum for one night.
But the biggest use of time travel in the franchise comes later in the movie. The entire premise of this is that one clause of Santa’s magical contract is known as the “escape clause” which basically allows Santa to rewind time and not become Santa at all.
Jack Frost, in an effort to take Santa’s holiday for himself, helps Scott Calvin initiate the clause thus resetting the timeline to an alternate version where Jack Frost is Santa Claus.
Scott Calvin is transported directly from the night he became Santa to what would have been present day when he initiated the clause. One thing I find odd is that this clause doesn’t wipe the person’s memories of being Santa. Instead it uses an odd double dose of temporal magic to send a person back so they don’t put on the coat and then thrusts them head first into a potential timeline where they hadn’t been Santa at all.
Without any idea of what’s going on around them because as far they’re concerned the last however long it’s been they’ve been Santa Claus.
Scott gets an odd bit of It’s A Wonderful Life style treatment. He didn’t really want to initiate the clause but it does let him see how putting that coat on 12 years previous has made his life and the lives of those around him infinitely better.
What got me thinking about this when I was watching last week (yes, I was one of those who binge-watched the trilogy the day after it went on Netflix), was what happens at the end of the movie.
There was a series of events that lead to Scott initially initiating the clause. He reset the timeline and then reset it again putting it back to the way it was.
Perfectly the way it was.
That’s something I couldn’t quite buy. He resets the timeline twice and everything falls perfectly back into place. There’s a temporal theory that says that just by travelling in time, you change things.
For example, consider how much Marty changed in the first Back to the Future movie just by trying to make his way back to his own time. There’s a fair bit of things similar but things didn’t quite fall into place.
I guess the justification here is that they didn’t really change time, per say. Once Scott reset the timeline the second time technically his past self did what he had done the first time.
My brother was helping me muse through this and said that technically magic could have compensated. Which might work in their universe, since scientific time travel and temporal magic often operate in vastly different ways.
But I’ll still ponder if everything would fall back into place just so perfectly.
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