A JOINT United States-Canada military monitoring agency continued this year its decades-long Christmas tradition of tracking Santa’s whereabouts, helping children around the globe find out when his reindeer-powered, present-filled sleigh would be coming to town.

A 3D, interactive website showed Santa Claus and his reindeer on their imagined worldwide delivery route, allowing users to click and learn more about the various cities along the way.

The Santa tracker presented by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad) dates to 1955, when a Colorado newspaper advertisement printed a phone number to connect children with Santa but mistakenly directed them to the hotline for the military nerve centre.

To avoid disappointing the little ones, Norad’s director of operations at the time, Harry Shoup, ordered his staff to check the radar to see where Old Saint Nick might be and update the children on his location.

When not spreading holiday cheer, Norad conducts aerospace and maritime control and warning operations – including monitoring for missile launches from North Korea, something that may have been on Santa’s mind this year as he passed over, with the most recent intercontinental ballistic missile test just days ago.

Sixty-eight years later, Norad continued its tradition of setting up a temporary call centre out of its Colorado headquarters to answer children’s burning questions.

A photo posted by the group on Facebook showed rows of people answering phones, some in uniform and others wearing red Santa caps.

Some top-level US dignitaries – including President Joe Biden and wife Jill Biden – joined in on the holiday action.

“This evening, the President and First Lady participated in the North American Aerospace Defense Command Santa-tracking calls with children and families across the country,” the White House said in a statement.

Earlier yesterday, the tracker went down for a short while, leaving children in the Pacific region in the dark about his exact position.

“Hey #SantaTrackers! We may be having a couple of technical difficulties with our tracking map, but #Santa is still flying! He is headed to Fiji next!” the group that ran the tracker said on its Facebook page, before announcing a fix an hour later.

Father Christmas had begun his journey with an out-of-this-world first stop, Norad said – the International Space Station orbiting Earth.

The reindeer-pulled sleigh was also seen traversing Israel as well as flying over southern Gaza, criss-crossing Africa, and venturing southward to Palmer Station, a research facility in Antarctica.

Santa then headed up through South America, bound for the US as he unloaded approximately 100,000 gifts every second.

Around 10pm local time (0300 GMT), Kris Kringle and his reindeer were spotted entering US airspace near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, before continuing their journey across the rest of the country – with nearly 5.5 billion presents, and counting, delivered worldwide. – AFP, December 25, 2023.