A girl points to a Santa Claus doll in a Christmas items shop, in a Christian neighborhood in Tehran, Iran. (AP)

Lizzie Solano, center, and her sister Sarah take phone calls from children asking where Santa is and when he will deliver presents to their house, during the fifth annual NORAD Tracks Santa Operation, at the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, at Peterson Air Force Base, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA. Over a thousand volunteers at NORAD handle more than 100,000 phone calls from children around the world every Christmas Eve, when NORAD continually projects Santa Claus’s supposed progress delivering presents. (AP)

A man stands on a platform as steam rises from the boilers of a pumping-station in Lemmer, the northern Netherlands. The station pumps excess water from the northern province to a nearby lake. (AFP)

A Filipino boy carries a sack as he wades along a bed of soiled fruits and debris after fire broke at a commerical establishment at the busy shopping area of Divisoria, in Manila, Philippines. (AP)

A man walks past snowy trees in a park, with the air temperature at about minus 8 degrees Celsius (17.6 degrees Fahrenheit), in Russia’s southern city of Stavropol. (Reuters)

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth watches a preview of her Christmas message with a pair of 3D glasses, studded with Swarovski crystals in the form of a ‘Q’, with producer John McAndrew and director John Bennett (R), at Buckingham Palace in central London. The Christmas message to the Commonwealth is to be broadcast in 3D for the first time. (Reuters)

The clothes and eyelashes of a fisherman are seen frozen near Shitoukoumen Reservoir during a winter fishing event in Changchun, Jilin province, China, December 23, 2012. (Reuters)

A Syrian refugee woman stands at the entrance of her family container in a refugee camp named ‘Container City’ on the Turkish-Syrian border in Oncupinar in Kilis province, southern Turkey. (Reuters)

People eat meals during a Christmas Eve supper for homeless and poor people organized by local restaurant owner Jan Kosciuszko at Old Town Main Market Square in Krakow, southern Poland, December 23, 2012. (Reuters)

A river gull flies over reflection of a bridge on the Sava river, in Belgrade, Serbia. (AP)

A Pakistani homeless family warm themselves by a fire during a foggy day at a slum area of Lahore. (AFP)

The giant star Zeta Ophiuchi is having a ‘shocking’ effect on the surrounding dust clouds in this infrared image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Zeta Ophiuchi is a young, large and hot star located around 370 light-years away. It is about six times hotter, eight times wider, 20 times more massive, and about 80,000 times as bright. This massive star is travelling at a snappy pace of about 54,000 mph (24 kilometers per second), fast enough to break the sound barrier in the surrounding interstellar material. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)