NORAD Santa Tracker 2009: Where is Santa Now

Dec. 24, 2009 — -- "'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house/Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse...."

So where is Santa Claus now? Since the Cold War the job of tracking him has fallen to NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, headquartered at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado.

Click here for the official NORAD Santa Tracker 2009.

It's one of those traditions that has just kept going since 1955, even though the Cold War is over, and -- oh, forgive us for bursting a bubble -- the NORAD Santa Tracker is now run by a civilian company, Analytical Graphics, Inc., of Exton, Pa. Your taxpayer dollars are not hard at work in this case; the project has corporate sponsors from GE to Google to Verizon.

Analytical Graphics usually supplies visualization software for aerospace engineers -- for the military, NASA, private companies that build planes or spacecraft, and so forth. If you've seen computer animation of a military mission, it may well have come from them.

If you go to the site, you'll see them taking an engineer's literal approach to the St. Nick story. He comes down people's chimneys at midnight -- which means, if you look at the NORAD map, that you'll see him moving across the world's time zones from east to west, instead of coming down from the north pole.

This being the 21st century, there are the inevitable links to Santa Claus' Facebook and Twitter pages, and his location is projected on a Google map. A typical tweet: "Santa was just in Wulumuqi, China! It's 1,400 miles from any coastline -- no city in the world is farther from water."

But the Santa Claus story remains pretty much what it's been since Clement Clark Moore (or was it Henry Livingston Jr.?) published "A Visit from St. Nicholas" in 1823, and technology has not changed it much. So it's best to close as he did: "Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!"