FE Meme
Santa Goes Around, Not Across
#249: Santa travels around the world on Christmas Eve, not across it, implying circumnavigation follows a rim path that fits a flat disk better than a ball.
The Meme
Holiday macro meme with on-image text about Santa going around the world rather than across it, tied to flat-Earth wordplay on "around the globe."
Why It Spreads
Santa going around the world on Christmas Eve is familiar folklore, and reframing around versus across as flat-disk rim travel turns a children's story into a geography gotcha. Seasonal sharing gives the wordplay extra reach without any measurement attached.
What It Gets Wrong
The holiday macro about Santa going "around the world, not across it" is English idiom wordplay tied to flat-Earth tagging, not a GNSS readout. Magellan-era circumnavigation logs, modern solo sailing records, and published airline great circles all close loops on a convex body of equatorial circumference ~40075 km using minimal geodesics. Toy-map wordplay does not change measured São Paulo to Johannesburg schedules, polar route logistics, or time zones that advance with rotation on a spheroid. TestTheGlobe's Flights Only Make Sense On A Flat Map and TestTheGlobe's Flight Path Comparison walk through the observations and predictions this image skips.
The Debunk
The holiday macro about Santa going "around the world, not across it" is English idiom wordplay, not a GNSS readout. Magellan-era circumnavigation logs, modern solo sailing records, and published airline great circles all close loops on a convex body of equatorial circumference ~40075 km.
- Idiom topology is not surveying; TestTheGlobe's Flights Only Make Sense On A Flat Map explains why great circles look wrong on flat projections but minimize distance on a sphere.
- TestTheGlobe's Flight Path Comparison plots circumnavigation-style routes on the WGS84 ellipsoid that folklore loosely references.
- Longitudinal time bands advance with rotation; TestTheGlobe's Time Zones Are Fake addresses claims that 24 one-hour offsets are staged rather than following spin on a convex body.
- Mercator and other projections stretch paths for display; TestTheGlobe's Map Distortion Does Not Matter separates map art from measured distances.