What is Santa tracker really?

The Santa tracker is one hour north to south, from each time zone on Christmas. It’s to give children warning to go to bed so that Santa can deliver gifts.

@Mimishu1995 Sorry that I can help much further, as I always fall asleep all Christmas mornings and evening.

@RedDeerGuy1 seems to have it about right. and as you said Mimi, it’s got to be computer generated, because Santa is an imaginary concept, even if it is a widespread part of our culture.

NORAD.

It’s just stuffy old NORAD having a whimsical bit of fun.

Part of perhaps the largest conspiracy, in human history.

It’s AMAZING, how much society collectively LIES to children about such crap.
I get it, and I try to keep it secret too.
Finding out, that my suspicions that Santa could potentially be fake were real, taught me as a very young boy “don’t trust ANYONE.”..
Christianity eventually fell from my beliefs, as it too became ridiculously plagued by lack of ANY credibility.

Ultimately. It’s a capitalism thing.

I never knew what it was either. I have heard of Santa Tracker, but did not know it was a google program. I assumed it was a countdown to Christmas. I used your link and it looks like it has some simple games to play with Christmas themes. I’ll be following the Q.

NORAD puts it out every year just for fun.

@MrGrimm888…when I learned about Santa it certainly didn’t wreck my faith in everything and everyone! It was a isolated incident.
Accepting the fact that God isn’t real either was more difficult.

^Well. You are more forgiving, than me.
My entire family, and practically all of society, had collectively been lying to me. Worse, the lies, didn’t add up.
To me, it taught me an invaluable lesson.

I have a great degree of faith, in everyone. I trust them, to be untrustworthy.

Accepting that God was fake, just played further into my mistrust of people.
It also taught me how dangerous, such massive lies are. Think of how many hundreds of millions/billions of people have suffered as a result in one organized religion or another. Well. One ”lie,” or another…

The real world, is not a Disney production.

@JLeslie yeah, you can wait until Christmas to see what I’m talking about. Meanwhile, the games are more entertaining than it looks. They are good time killers for me :)

@MrGrimm888 I have bo problem with telling kids the Santa story, I wonder if it’s partly because I was raised an atheist. I didn’t have Santa as a kid, but my Christian friends did, and it was in Christmas shows and impossible to escape not knowing the story. I did have the tooth fairy.

Lots of stories are make believe and magic in childhood. I loved the shows Bewitched and Jeannie as a kid, that’s all fake.

I would have assumed to most Christian children God would be totally different than Santa, but maybe for some children it isn’t. It’s interesting to me how some children raised with God and religion at a very early age figure out for themselves that none of it is making sense to them. My dad phrases it that as a pre-teen he realized people will believe anything.

@MrGrimm888 Some parents view it as lying to kids and they don’t do it, and some view it as creating a magical thing for kids that only lasts a few years, and so they do it. How the kids view it when they grow up is up to them.

For me, I believed in Santa, the Easter bunny and for a brief time, the Tooth Fairy, and it was fun and magical, and I did it for my daughter and she seemed to really enjoy it. If she wants to call me a lying, horrible mother when she gets older, she can. I don’t think she will but who knows.

Parents create the magic.

It’s not a big deal, and I am very much part of the conspiracy.

I’m not trying to cancel Christmas.

But this question, reminded me of exactly HOW deep the Santa hole goes.
That we would also manufacture the story that our nation’s strategic defense agency NORAD, is ok with Santa in American airspace, but tracks him anyway. Sounds like some sort of coordination with Santa, like with space aliens and the government.

I remember getting in huge trouble, because I told my friend. His mother, called my mother, and it was a big deal.

I was like 8, I thought my friend knew too. It wasn’t remotely malicious.
But people were mad at ME, for being a whistle blower!
I was not capable of understanding why I was in trouble for figuring it out, setting a trap and proving Santa was my parents, and then telling my close friend about it.

I think that they told me, something like I wouldn’t get any presents again if I spread the “truth!” Fucking blackmailed me, minutes after I just broke the story of the century!
I’m smiling, talking about it, but it IS totally INSANE, how big the Santa conspiracy is, and how far we go to keep it on the down low.
If they were lying about Santa, they could be lying about anything.
As I said, it quickly became clear to me, the similarities of the two massive conspiracies. (That is the Santa myth, and the Christian God myth.)
Both nonsensical, and both all kept alive by people who lie to their children. In retrospect, and from more adult conversations, I realized that many people didn’t really believe in ALL of the religious teachings we were all taught either.
Many people who did believe, had different interpretations of Christianity, and HEAVILY cherry picked it.

It WAS magical. A LOT of things were, when I was very young.

I don’t think it hurts anything unless the parents keep insisting he IS real after the kid figures it out.
I approached my parents with my suspicions and they instantly confirmed them.

^It becomes too ridiculous, at a point. Not that my parents did a bad job. The feasibility was the problem.
When I got confirmation, I cried and it sucked, even though I knew already. It was the end of an era…

…ridiculous at a point. What is that point GrimmOne?

^As I aged, I naturally asked questions about Santa.
The answers I got, were occasionally inconsistent, and the details eventually seemed impossible. But. I had never uncovered an international conspiracy before.
It was difficult opening presents, without thinking of how they could have come down the chimney. I lived in a townhouse in Germany in the years before I moved back here, and that place didn’t even have a chimney. So.
My parents had to keep coming up, with answers for my questions.
I’ll NEVER forget, how different Christmas was in Europe. In some of the older places, it REALLY was a magical time.
Nothing like the Walmart Christmas we endure for several months, in America.

I “set a trap,” the first Christmas back in America, at our eventual house. (We lived with my grandparents for a while first, I was actually 9 years old.)
I put some clear tape on the brass and glass fireplace cover door, on the 24th at bedtime.
It was a complex mission, that required cunning and stealth.
In the end, Christmas morning, there were presents for all, but the fireplace tape hadn’t been moved.
I confronted my parents, and like a confident attorney I closed my case after brilliantly laying out my evidence and the inconsistencies.
I felt SO proud of myself, watching them turn to each other, clearly busted and without a possible realistic rebuttal.

That pride, turned into anguish, and I cried…......because Santa was dead…I killed him…

Well sounds like your parents tried to trick you long after you had it figured out. That would have pissed me off too.
My folks fessed up immediately but made me feel better because they said I could help them create the magic for the Little Kids. I had 2 younger sisters.

PS Santa is still alive, dude! You didn’t kill him.

A friend of mine told her kids when they asked if Santa is real, “once you stop believing Santa stops bringing you gifts.”

@JLeslie That’s exactly what I used to tell my daughter.

It’s very logical, really.

^That’s blackmail!

@MrGrimm888 It doesn’t fit the definition of blackmail.

Yes it does @jca2! To a kid “If you don’t believe in Santa you won’t get any presents.” can sure be blackmail.

Blackmail is when you tell someone if they don’t pay you, you’ll reveal a secret. Look it up.

However, I don’t know why you @Dutchess_III and @MrGrimm888 are all on me about Santa, being that I’m 1 in several million parents that told their kid that santa exists. If you want to persist in thinking I’m horrible, so be it. Really, it’s between me and my kid. When one of you gets Parent of the Year, we can discuss.

Did my lighthearted question just turn into an argument?

A discussion. Not an argument. At least, to me…

Yeah, maybe because I look at it with an adult’s eyes I don’t see much beyond silly computer-generated animation. I have never thought of the implication about Santa. To me this is just some oddity I see every year then forget soon after. I’m just there to enjoy the games :)

^Culture is always odd.

I never told my kids he was real but I talked about him as if he was real.