Today’s holiday tech delight: Gmail’s personalized phone call from Santa. That’s right, you can set up an audio or video message from Santa Claus to call your family and friends.

You put in your name and the name of the recipient and Santa will work in your relationship, location, the recipient’s favorite food, style, nickname and the gift they hope to get. There are plenty of suggestions so that you can quickly put together a very funny phone call.

This in a great add-on to last year’s Santa-tracker using NORAD and Google Maps. This gadget allows you to track Santa’s progress over Christmas Eve on a large Google Map display, and you can zoom in to check out videos as he drops off presents at different locations around the globe. In case kids don’t have a hard enough time getting to bed that night, this instills some idea of when exactly during the night Santa will be getting there. That’s either an excuse to stay up until right before or an encouragement to sneak out of bed, now that you have a better idea of his timing.

And Google’s final contribution to the spirit of the season: The Let It Snow surprise in the Google search window. If you type in the words “let it snow”, snowflakes will begin filling up the browser window until the screen has frosted over and you have to use the curser as a scraper or click the defrost button if you actually want to see anything.

Google has proven time and again that they are a company with a sense of humor and I can appreciate that. It may not be quite the same as getting an iPad in your stocking but I still think that a phone call from Santa is the best holiday tech of the season.