Santa tracking begins: NORAD at 9 a.m. GMT, Google at 10 a.m.GMT on 24 December
The most exciting holiday of the year is almost here! Children everywhere are counting down the hours until Santa Claus comes to town, reindeer at the ready and sleighs piled high with gifts.
Thanks to modern technology, you can actually track Santa’s sleigh — find out if he is near and where he is delivering all the gifts. Two major trackers lets you see where he is right now, when he’s arriving, and how the festive magic unfolds across the globe.
According to TechRadar, the two most popular trackers to follow St Nick are NORAD, or North American Aerospace Defense Command, and Google. These two trackers follow Santa’s every movement.
This year marks the 70th anniversary of Santa tracking, a tradition that began in 1955 with a happy accident. A Sears catalogue misprinted a phone number, directing children not to Santa’s hotline but to the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) operations centre in Colorado Springs. The officer on duty at that time decided to play along, telling children where Santa was. From then on, CONAD began issuing yearly press releases about Santa’s whereabouts.
When NORAD was formed in 1958, it inherited the tradition, delighting generations of children. In 2004, Google joined the fun with its own Santa Tracker, offering a new way to follow St Nick as he spreads holiday cheer around the world.
NORAD’s official tracker remains the most iconic. Run by the US Military, it mixes updates from uniformed officers with real-time maps showing Santa’s sleigh in flight.
To use it, you can download the app from the App Store or Google Play Store. The app includes mini-games and live updates of Santa’s gift-giving. While its design is fairly simple, NORAD’s wholesome history makes it the most popular. The tradition of military volunteers answering calls from eager children asking about Santa’s whereabouts only adds to its charm and holiday magic.
NORAD has been partnering with Verizon’s network for 23 years now. They also added an AI chatbot called Radar to help you spot Santa, but if you prefer to use the phone, then dialling +1 (877) HI-NORAD will do the trick too.
Google Santa Tracker has been running since 2004. It combines the power of Google Maps with clever, real-time insights into where Father Christmas is spreading holiday cheer.
In it, users can play games and watch videos, all easily accessible through a large ‘Play’ button on the site. The tracker also encourages children to learn how to code as they explore a winter wonderland throughout the month.
While Google’s Santa Tracker doesn’t have the same satellite-tracking capabilities as NORAD, the tech giant has jokingly ‘teamed up’ with the North Pole to locate Santa in real time — using search, radar, lasers — it’s basically just holiday magic.
At the moment, neither the NORAD Santa Tracker nor the Google Santa Tracker is live, so Santa’s exact location remains a mystery. He’s likely busy making final preparations — double-checking his list, loading the sleigh, and ensuring the reindeer are ready for take-off.
Both trackers are set to go live in the UK on 24 December. NORAD begins monitoring Santa’s journey earlier at 4:00 a.m. EST, which coincides with 9:00 a.m. in the UK, an hour before Google’s tracker launches at 10 a.m. GMT. From then on, both NORAD and Google will provide real-time updates as Santa travels across the globe, delivering gifts throughout Christmas Eve.
Read more on International Business Times UK
