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Posted by Melissa Crounse, Santa
Tracker

Now Dasher! Now Dancer! Now, Prancer and Vixen! On, Comet! On,
Cupid! On, Donner and Blitzen!

We're counting down the hours until Santa's flight around
the world. On Monday, December 24th, starting at 1 am PST, visit href="http://www.noradsanta.org/" >noradsanta.org to track Santa
with NORAD on his annual trip.

NORAD will use Google Maps to track several hundred of Santa's
stops in over 200 countries and territories, and will embed videos
of Santa's stops captured on their href="http://www.noradsanta.org/en/how.htm" >Santa Cams on the
Google Map and post the videos on the href="http://youtube.com/profile?user=NORADTracksSanta" >NORAD
Tracks Santa YouTube channel.

Want to see more of Santa? NORAD will also provide a downloadable
Santa Tracker file to track several thousand of Santa's stops
in Google Earth.
Santa's visits are only a few seconds long, and then — poof,
he's off to the next location. Click on the gift icons in
Google Maps or Google Earth to learn more about the cities that
Santa visits.

Happy holidays from all of us at Google!

Tags: , Crounse, Dasher, Melissa, Now, Posted, Santa, TrackerNow

Here in Portugal there’s
a forest fire burning through the landscape (Portugal’s been http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3164843.stm hit hard
by these fires in recent years), but there seems to be a little
more to this particular plume of smoke…

>

Does that not look like a bearded face at this distance? In fact
(maybe I’m just getting carried away in the spirit of the season),
but I think that looks quite a lot like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus Santa
Claus!

Thanks to Ricardo Castro.

Tags: , Claus, Face, Santa

Posted by Carrie Farrell, Veteran Santa
Tracker

It was more than half a century ago, on Christmas Eve in 1955, that
a Sears Roebuck & Co. store in Colorado Springs advertised a
special hotline number for kids to call Santa. What the company
didn't know at the time was that they had inadvertently
misprinted the telephone number. Instead of Santa's workshop,
the phone number put kids through to the

href="http://www.norad.mil/" >North American Aerospace Defense
Command (NORAD), the bi-national U.S.-Canadian military
organization responsible for the aerospace defense of the U. S. and
Canada. Worse, it wasn't just any number at NORAD: it was the
commander-in-chief's operations hotline. In the spirit of the
season, Colonel Harry Shoup, the director of operations at the
time, had his staff check radar data for any indication of a sleigh
making its way south from the North Pole. They found that indeed
there were signs of Santa, and merrily gave the children who
called an update on his location. Thus, a tradition was born, and
NORAD has continued to help children track Santa on Christmas Eve
ever since.

It just so happens that Colonel Shoup is my grandfather, which is
why I'm so excited that, 52 years later, Google is joining the
effort. This holiday season, NORAD has partnered with Google to use
technology including Google Maps, Google Earth, iGoogle and YouTube
to track Santa. I can remember tracking Santa with my grandfather
as a child, and I'm so proud to see my company carry on his
vision of doing something this special for kids around the
world.

The countdown begins December 1st on NORAD's href="http://www.noradsanta.org/" >website,
where families can find a new kid-friendly game or activity every
day until December 24th. And starting at 1:00 am PST on December
24th, you'll be able to track Santa's trip in real time.
You can download href="http://earth.google.com/" id="tv1z" >Google Earth and add
the href="http://www.google.com/ig/adde?moduleurl=http://www.labpixies.com/gadgads/norad/norad_new.xml&source=snta"
id="yz-4" >NORAD Tracks Santa iGoogle gadget to your iGoogle
page anytime, but make sure to come back to href="http://www.noradsanta.org/" id="i5xa" >noradsanta.org on
December 24th to download the special Santa Tracking file for an
enhanced 3D Santa-tracking experience.

onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"
href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_Ap14FtNN91w/R1AbpzjHTpI/AAAAAAAAAeE/7uHcEfbxD18/s1600-R/Carrie_NORAD.JPG" >
height="1" width="1" />

Tags: , Carrie, Farrell, half, Posted, Santa, TrackerIt, Veteran