If you'd rather not wait until Christmas morning to find out if you made Santa Claus' naughty or nice lists, both NORAD and Google are tracking Ol St. Nick's worldwide journey all Christmas Eve.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) has been tracking Santa Claus' gift giving trip across the globe for 57 years with its Santa Tracker, according to Mashable. NORAD has a full staff of Santa trackers ready to answer your questions, taking calls beginning early Christmas Eve at 877-HI-NORAD to let anyone know when Santa is due to arrive. The volunteers are stationed at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colo., home of the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
NORAD will also be posting live updates of Santa's journey to its website, as well as on its Facebook and Twitter accounts.
A joint U.S.-Canada command responsible for protecting the skies over both nations, NORAD says its tradition of Santa-tracking was born of a humble typo in a newspaper ad in 1955.
Capt. Jeff Davis, director of NORAD and the U.S. Northern Command Public Affairs, recently related the story in a guest post on Microsoft's official blog:
"It's hard to believe it all started with a typo. A program renowned the world over -- one that brings in thousands of volunteers, prominent figures such as the First Lady of the United States, and one that has been going on for more than five decades -- all started as a misprint.
That error ran in a local Colorado Springs newspaper back in 1955 after a local department store printed an advertisement with an incorrect phone number that children could use to 'call Santa.' Except that someone goofed. Or someone mistook a three for an eight. Maybe elves broke into the newspaper and changed the number. We'll never know.
But somehow, the number in the advertisement changed, and instead of reaching the 'Santa' on call for the local department store, it rang at the desk of the Crew Commander on duty at the Continental Air Defense Command Operations Center, the organization that would one day become the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or 'NORAD.'
And when the commander on duty, Col. Harry Shoup, first picked up the phone and heard kids asking for Santa, he could have told them they had a wrong number.
But he didn't.
Instead, the kind-hearted colonel asked his crew to play along and find Santa's location. Just like that, NORAD was in the Santa-tracking business."
NORAD's Santa Tracker was so popular in 2011, volunteers answered almost 102,000 calls, and more than 7,700 emails.
You can also track Santa along with NORAD with mobile apps this year using the NORAD Tracks Santa app for iOS and Android.
You can track Santa on the web at noradsanta.org, or check out Google's live updates of Santa's journey at www.google.com/santatracker.
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