Last night Santa Claus swept across the Washington area delivering toys to thousands of girls and boys. However, this is no longer an easy task, even for Santa.
The national capital region now has about 5 million residents living in more than 1 million houses and apartment buildings, many of which have no chimneys at all, much less fireplaces by which to carefully hang stockings. Presumably, Santa is able to find alternative means of entry: open windows, pet access doors, clothes dryer exhausts, fresh air intakes, mail slots.
Not surprisingly, he has slimmed down a bit, thanks in part to the best selling "North Pole Conquers South Beach" diet book.
In recent years, Santa also has had to feed his eight tiny reindeer USDA-approved, performance-enhancing supplements to achieve the extra speed and endurance needed to cover the entire territory in a night. That territory has expanded dramatically, encompassing hundreds of square miles.
At altitude, Santa gets a unique view of how this urbanized-suburbanized region is shaping up, or not shaping up. Make no mistake -- he knows what's naughty and what's nice in the patterns he can clearly discern.
A century ago, he looked down and saw a simpler, more compact picture.
Dense clusters of luminous points were concentrated in the District and its downtown, along with Arlington and Alexandria on the Virginia side of the Potomac River. Within neighborhoods surrounding the capital city planned by Pierre L'Enfant were sparser clusters that diminished and faded away only a few miles from the Capitol dome.
Santa now peers down at a glowing tapestry of tens of millions of light sources reaching from horizon to horizon.
He soars over a vast aggregation of communities stretching east toward the Chesapeake Bay, north toward Baltimore and Frederick, west toward the Blue Ridge Mountains and south toward the Rappahannock River in Virginia.
Within a sprawling fabric of residential neighborhoods, he observes an archipelago of business districts, shopping centers, office and industrial parks, school campuses and, appearing with more frequency, large box-like buildings surrounded by parked cars.
