Tracking Santa Claus is one of the most fun activities to do with the kids on Christmas Eve. You can use the computer together and watch real-time reports on the location of Santa's sleigh. This makes Santa more real for your kids, passes the time while you try to get them to bed and often offers some educational benefits.
Whether your kids believe in Santa or not, going online to track Santa Claus is a fun activity for the family. It's also fun to plan for the Santa Claus visit by making a welcome sign and putting out some snacks. Here are the best Web sites for tracking Santa and spending Christmas Eve together in the spirit of the holiday.
NORAD
The most popular Santa tracking Web site is NORADSanta.org. NORAD is the North American Aerospace Defense Command. While this is a real organization, NORAD sponsors a Santa tracker to give information, updated every five minutes, about Santa's progress around the world from the North Pole. Different announcer's voices narrate facts about Santa and the areas over which his sleigh is passing. In the past, volunteers manned phone lines when kids called in asking about Santa's whereabouts. Today, the Web site handles millions of clicks on Christmas Eve.
NORAD has partnered with Google Earth to provide live, 3-D coverage of Santa's annual flight. Kids will enjoy seeing pictures of Santa as he flies past recognizable landmarks. You can also learn a bit about US and world geography as you follow his Christmas Eve flight path.
NORAD's program began more than 50 years ago, when a newspaper advertisement for a Santa hotline was misprinted with the phone number for the Continental Air Defense headquarters, the forerunner of NORAD. The commander and his staff gamely fielded phone calls from kids throughout Christmas eve, offering them updates on Santa's location.
For several years, NORAD provided a telephone hotline and a series of Christmas Eve radio updates on Santa's flight. In 1997, the first online Santa tracker appeared.
SantaClaus.net
You can visit SantaClaus.net throughout the year to send e-mails to Santa and to explore Christmas songs, stories and games. On Christmas Eve, you can use this site's Flash-based Santa Tracker to follow Santa's progress around the world. Though the tracking isn't quite as detailed as NORAD's site, SantaClaus.net does offer plenty of other diversions for the kids, should watching Santa's progress start to get tedious.
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