Christmas Fun – Santa Claus is Coming to Town
If you’re not on the good list by now, it’s probably a little bit too late but at least you can still enjoy the fun and excitement that Christmas Eve brings. Whilst we appreciate many of you will be in the office, we also know that today may not be the most productive of working days, so if you are going to have some fun, have some proper fun, so here’s some great sites to make sure your final pre-Christmas day goes off with a Ho, Ho, Ho.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) – a joint US-Canadian operation that watches the skies for threats over North America ended up tracking Santa by accident way back in 1955. A typo in an ad for a local Sears store invited children to call a telephone number for an update on Santa’s progress. The misprint meant calls went through to CONAD – NORAD’s predecessor – instead of the Sears Santa elves but in true Christmas spirit they were inspired. Rather than disappoint the kids who were calling, the military pulled out all the stops and used its radars to track Father Christmas turned its high-tech radar technology to spot Father Christmas in the skies.
NORAD’s tracking has been a tradition ever since. As a kid, I tuned into the radio for updates. As a parent, I’ve helped my kids get updates from NORAD through the web. And on the web, Google was the long-time mapping partner for NORAD — until last year.
For 2012, Bing became the NORAD Santa tracking partner. But Google, which clearly enjoyed tracking Jolly St. Nick, decided to run its own Google Santa Tracker. It was the first major alternative to NORAD in recent memory. Most alternative Santa trackers I’ve monitored over the years have given up, since NORAD has done the job so well and is so well known.
Google Santa Tracker – http://www.google.com/santatracker/
As is the way in the digital world very few sites are unique, with alternatives available offering slightly different insights into information you seek. So it is with Santa. New to the world last year Santa Tracker from Google looks set to run again this year with a countdown on the site eeking ever closer to the magic day at the time we wrote this. That’s despite a few queries last year that seemed to suggest that NORAD and Google tracked Santa to different places at the same time at points last Christmas. Whether that added to the magic surrounding how Father Christmas delivers all his presents in time or just added to the confusion is for you to decide, but with a series of microsites built into the Google Santa Tracker along the lines of the wonderful Google Doodles http://www.google.com/doodles/ this is certainly worth keeping an eye on.
So that’s how we can find out what he’s up to today, but there’s plenty more information out there on Father Christmas, it’#s as if the internet was designed to run his PR. We live in a digital world, yet Santa still appears to be a traditionalist – open-top sleigh, hoof-power, hessian sacks etc. So what if Santa was less technophobe and more techno-proactive?
This infographic from Finances Online pulls together the most advanced tech ever imagined to help Santa out. There’s even a Naughtiness database, which has got to be easier to manage than a team of robins and a big book.
On the inforgraphic theme, this Australian one proves it’s not all smiles and ho, ho, ho being Santa. It’s actually one of the most dangerous jobs in the world:
http://www.lifebroker.com.au/life-insurance/the-most-dangerous-job-in-the-world#.UrlMH_RdWSo
One must know fact about Santa Claus is the names of his reindeers. For some background bio on Comet, Cupid, Vixen, Dancer, Prancer, Blitzen, Dasher, Donder (Donner) check this site:
http://www.claus.com/reindeer/index.php
Although there is no mention of Rudolph – I guess the song has pre-educated us there, nor Olive the other Reindeer – see here.
That’s it from me, but do search for Santa online, as there are 1,000s of other snippets of Christmas gold to be found and quite possibly some search engine magic happening today too.
From all the 123-reg Content Hub team: Have a very Merry Christmas!
