In addition to Advent calendars, you can add a touch of holiday magic by following Santa’s preparations and tours on this website. A great way to keep the kids waiting!
Those who have been good this year are certainly looking forward to Santa’s sack full of gifts. It’s a real countdown that begins with, every morning, a touch of excitement at the idea of knowing that we are getting a little closer to the long-awaited day. Hence the success of Advent calendars – which are now available in a version for adults.
But once December 24th, you still have to wait for Santa Claus to come by. That’s because he has the whole planet to visit after all! Besides, did you know that its journey takes 25 hours? It makes its first stop in the far east of Russia, at 10 p.m. local time, which corresponds to 5 a.m. in New York and 11 a.m. in Paris. We just have to hope that the traffic is good!
To find out exactly what time the red man will pass our door, Google is relaunching its annual Santa Claus tracking function, which allows millions of young people – and not so young people – to view his journey from the North Pole in real time, the beloved Santa Tracker – On Santa’s Track in French. This is a platform accessible free of charge from a web browser, offering different activities to wait until the end of year festivities. There are mini-games and videos, but also sometimes little-known information about Christmas celebrations. In addition to a countdown, new elements are accessible every day throughout the month of December, like an Advent calendar.
You can find a whole bunch of fun and educational activities there. Thus, it is possible to learn coding using elves, to learn more about Christmas traditions around the world, to learn end-of-year holiday vocabulary in several languages, to listen to an interactive story, play mini-games or even visit a virtual museum. It is also possible to go directly through the Google Assistant to follow Santa’s news throughout the month of December, to call him to sing a song and to listen to his jokes.
But you will have to wait until December 24 to access the real Santa Tracker, which allows you to visualize the distribution of gifts to good children around the world. It takes the form of a map, with Santa’s current location, his next stop, a live video feed of his journey, and the estimated time he will arrive at each specific location. We can also see photos of the places he has already been, a live count of gifts delivered and the distance that currently separates him from our place of residence.
But Google’s Santa Tracker is not the only project of this kind. Every year since 1955, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) has also made it possible to track the old bearded man throughout the night of gift distribution, througha dedicated sitealso with a whole range of activities. Enough to turn into a real stalker!