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Sometimes nice things come back and surprise you. Last year, just after I’d upgraded to Google Earth Plus, I was looking for some good Santa-stuff in Google Earth (so I could show my younger relatives something interesting on what is otherwise a very dull computer), and I spotted a shape: looking around Northern Europe I realised the nice crinkly edges formed a good pair of antlers.

So I made a mental note of their location and then kept looking. Then I saw what could be a face. So, cracking open the line drawing tool (back then, this was a feature that you had to pay for and was, in fact, the reason I’d upgraded from the free version of Google Earth) I started to expand from the face, sketching an outline of Santa, working out which mountains and valleys I could use to suggest a shape.

It looked pretty good, then I realised the scale was right and I could incorporate the antlers on a much larger scale, so I sketched a (very simplistic) reindeer, enough to guide an adult so they could point it out to a child. Then I came up with a simple story about Santa leaving clues of his whereabouts.

Someone in the Google Earth community had asked if there were any good Santa sightings, so I added it to the forum. I expected that the imagery of that area would have changed enough by now that it would no longer be visible, but happily, coverage of some areas is still fairly slow to update, so it can still be seen this year.

Yesterday it was covered by GEarthBlog and the number of downloads has thus increased rather rapidly - I suppose one year on there are many thousands of new Google Earth users out there, and many new sets of small sparkly eyes to look and wonder.

If you have Google Earth, you can download this file to see it, you can also visit my original post on the subject. If you can’t run Google Earth, you can view the overlay in Google Maps (it’s a bit messy, but it still works).

My apologies in advance if you end up with excited little finger marks all over your monitor :)

Happy Christmas!