With less than a week to go before Christmas, the kids are probably off from school, high on sugar, and getting antsy for presents, or whatever your family does to celebrate the holidays. At this point, you may be running low on cash and out of options for keeping them entertained while you’re still working.
If that’s the case, Google’s Santa Tracker website has all kinds of games and activities to hold their attention—including several that are educational. Here’s what to know.
How to access free holiday games and activities for kids
Before switching over to tracking Santa on Christmas Eve, the site offers an array of holiday-themed games and activities. They’ll come up as you scroll through the site; if you want to pull up a particular feature, you may be able to find it faster through the Family Guide.
Some of the activities available on the site include:
- Coding games: Kids (or adults) can learn the basics of how to code by playing Code Boogie or Code Lab.
- Holiday traditions: Click on an interactive map to find out how people around the world celebrate the holidays.
- Holiday greetings: Learn how to say various holiday-related words and phrases in different languages.
- Map quiz: Improve your geography skills with this timed map quiz.
How to track Santa on Christmas Eve
On December 24th, the Santa Tracker gets up and running, enabling users to follow Jolly Old St. Nick and his reindeer on their trip around the world—which, by the way, lasts for 25 hours. According to the site, that’s because he makes his first stop just after 10 p.m. local time in far eastern Russia, which is 5 a.m. in New York and 11 a.m. in Paris.
