NORAD Santa tracker: Follow Father Christmas on his journey – live
He's made his list, he's checked it twice, he already knows who's been naughty and nice. That's right: Santa Claus is coming to town – and you can follow him every snow-crunching step of the way.
Every year, the boffins at Norad (the North American Aerospace Defense Command) kindly dedicate December 24th to tracking Father Christmas as he darts from chimney to chimney, country to country, and continent to continent, delivering gifts while voraciously consuming sweetmeats.
Their service began by happenstance in 1955, when a Sears ad in a local paper offering the chance to speak to Santa mistakenly printed the top secret phone number of Conad – Norad’s predecessor. US Air Force Col. Harry Shoup took the first call from a young boy wanting to talk to Santa in good humour, and so a Christmas tradition was born.
Now, every year, thousands of volunteers staff telephones and computers to answer calls and e-mails from children (and adults) around the world. As of 2007, search engine Google has also provided an online tracker, in partnership with Norad.
Join us below to follow Santa's snow-flecked footsteps around the world. And keep your fingers crossed that when he arrives at your house, he'll find your name on the good side of that list ...
Eyes to the skies
He's off!
We have our first Santa spotting of Christmas Eve 2017, with Norad reporting that his red sleigh is currently zooming over Russia, en route to New Zealand and Australia.
Now that they've got Santa locked on their radar, you can follow his progress in the video at the top of this article.
Godspeed, Santa Claus.
Urgent: Presents needed
Are you just waking up to the realisation that it's Christmas Eve? Have you hitherto buried your head in the snow, unwilling to even countenance the idea that you might need to buy a semi-random assortment of objects for your friends and loved ones? Does the thought of a last-minute trip to the heaving High Street make you want to heave in an entirely different manner?
Then fear not, because we've rounded up some gift subscription ideas that a) will make great presents, and b) can be bought from the comfort of your front room, without so much as the need to put on a pair of pants.
Take a look at the below, and heave a sigh of relief.
The wait is nearly over
Well boys and girls, we're getting close. It seems that Santa is currently doing some last minute quality control. Here's a leaked image from his HQ in Greenland...
Santa's journey in numbers
Santa will travel an estimated 510,000,000km on Christmas Eve, which means he'll average 10,703,437.5km/hr, or about 1,800 miles per second.
According to calculations in 2014, there are roughly 1.85bn children who can hope to receive presents. With an average of 2.5 children per household, that means Santa has to slide down 740m chimneys.
To hit those numbers, Santa needs to visit 390,000 homes per minute – or 6,424 per second.
And what of the big guy's expanding waist line? Well, if each house places a 200ml glass of semi-skimmed milk and a mince pie by the fireplace, Santa will make his way throughy 148m litres of milk – enough to fill around 60 Olympic-size swimming pools – and chomp on 740m mince pies.
As there are around 250 calories in a mince pie and 100 calories in the glass of milk, that means Santa will consume 259bn calories on Christmas Eve alone.
Let's hope his trousers are elasticated.
Fake news?
A quick word on sources.
This time last year, the Santa tracking world was split asunder by an apparent disagreement between the two main tracking organisations.
While's Google's tracker reported its first sighting of Santa at 10am GMT, Norad's tracker lagged about 30 minutes behind. And it remained thus for the rest of the day: where one would see Santa arrive in, say, Madrid at 11pm GMT, the other would spot Santa in the same location half an hour later.
Little has been said publicly about the confusion since then. The two organisations have apparently closed ranks after the division – leaving online conspiracy theorists to run amok. Are there two Father Christmases, sharing the burden of delivering gifts to every (good) child in the land? Was one tracker detecting an echo in time, the logical consequence of the vertiginous speeds at which Santa must travel? Had Google picked up a genuine unidentified flying object?
No one has the answers to these questions – but suffice to say that if the same happens again this year, we at The Telegraph will treat Norad's tracker as the official timekeeper. No disrespect, Google, but those guys have got the nukes...
Why does NORAD track Santa?
While we wait for Santa to file all the obligatory flight plans and put the finishing touches on his sleigh packing (we imagine he's much like any father on Christmas Eve right now, desperately pushing another bag of presents into a car boot that's already jammed full), let's take the opportunity to look back on how this Santa tracking business started.
The year was 1955, and an advert promoting Santa's Toyland at the Sears department store had been published in the Colorado Springs newspaper, offering excited children the chance to speak to big man himself. The only problem? Rather than listing a dedicated Sears phoneline, the advert referenced a top secret hotline at Conad – Norad’s predecessor.
Over at CONAD, all was calm and well, when US Air Force Col. Harry Shoup, director of operations at the nuclear missile base, noticed the red phone on his desk ringing. Col. Shoup had two phones, and you can imagine what the red one was for. "Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the number," recalled his daughter Pam.
Presumably fearing the worst, Col. Shoup picked up the receiver. Pam continues: "And then there was a small voice that just asked, 'Is this Santa Claus?'"
Shoup was a straight-laced and disciplined man – much as you would expect for the director of operations at the US's nuclear HQ – and he reacted with due annoyance, suspecting he was the victim of a practical joke. But then the little voice started crying.
"And Dad realised that it wasn't a joke," says Shoup's daughter. "So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho'd and asked if he had been a good boy and, 'May I talk to your mother?' And the mother got on and said, 'You haven't seen the paper yet?
"'There's a phone number to call Santa. It's in the Sears ad.'"
Shoup took the reins and ran with them. Soon, he was on local radio every hour, updating listeners on the whereabouts of an unidentified flying object that had the unmistakable look of a sleigh.
From one small mistake, a tradition was born. Every year hence, the nuclear has run a Christmas Eve hotline for children, updating them on the whereabouts of the Great Benefactor In The Sky.
Over the years, Conad/Norad and Santa have proved to be a perfect fit. After all, who better to spot where Santa's sleigh is flying than a major operation dedicated to monitoring the skies? And what better way for the joint US-Canadian military division – men and women who routinely spent their time checking radar screens for signs of impending nuclear apocalypse – to spend their down time than talking to children about what they wanted for Christmas?
In 2007, Norad partnered with Google to put the Santa tracking ritual online, and now children around the world can follow Santa's snow-flecked footsteps as he delivers presents during the night before Christmas.
With the help of our live blog, of course.
T-minus one hour and counting
Good morning and welcome to The Telegraph's Christmas Eve live blog, where we'll be tracking the movements of good ol' Santa (that's Father Christmas or even St. Nick to you and I) as he dashes around the world, delivering gifts and joy to all those children who have been well behaved over the course of the last 12 months.
According to (un)official estimates, there's an hour to go before Santa hits the skies. So, put the kettle on, get some breakfast inside you, fish out those dusty binoculars from wherever you left them this time last year, and get ready to join us for the ride.
