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It’s now only a few days to go before Santa Claus sets out on his epic trip around the world bringing joy to all the children, well those that have been good of course. But is a sleigh the right mode of transport for such a huge trip?

As we know, Santa lives in a secret location in the snowy landscapes of Lapland inside the Arctic Circle. So, it shouldn’t really be a surprise that Santa is well acquainted with a sleigh. After all, we know a sleigh works well on snow especially when it’s going downhill. 

And for the flatter or uphill bits of his journey Santa has thought ahead and used the best reindeer in the land to pull the sleigh at high speed through the snow. So far, so good.

Another thing in favour of the sleigh is that it moves smoothly over the snow without any bumps, meaning that the piles of toys won’t get dislodged, or worse, fall out! And there are plenty of countries around the world where it’s winter

Whilst Britain itself falls behind the Alps, Pyrenees and Dolomites when it comes to experiencing extreme snow and ice, its natives have certainly punched above their weight when it comes to excelling at winter sports.

The haul of medals collected from recent Winter Olympics is admirable considering the lack of facilities in this country.

In the modern era it all started when John Curry won the Men’s Figure Skating crown at the 1976 Innsbruck Games and was quickly followed by Robin Cousins in 1980 who repeated the feat at the Lake Placid Olympics. 

And then it was the turn of ice dancers Torvill and Dean who achieved gold at the 1984 Olympics in Sarajevo with a never-seen-before perfect 6.0 score from every judge for their ‘Bolero’ routine.

More recently Britain’s women have achieved great success on the hard ice of the skeleton run. It started in 2002 when Alex Coomber w