A joint U.S.-Canadian military monitoring agency continued this year its decades-long Christmas tradition of tracking Santa’s whereabouts, helping children around the globe find out when his reindeer-powered, present-filled sleigh would be coming to town.
An interactive website at www.noradsanta.org showed Santa Claus and his reindeer on their imagined worldwide delivery route, allowing users to click and learn more about the various cities along the way.
The Santa tracker presented by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) dates to 1955 when a Colorado newspaper advertisement printed a phone number to connect children with Santa but mistakenly directed them to the hotline for the military nerve center.
To avoid disappointing the little ones, NORAD’s director of operations at the time, Colonel Harry Shoup, ordered his staff to check the radar to see where Old Saint Nick might be and update the children on his location. 68 years later, NORAD was continuing its tradition of setting up a temporary call centre out of its Colorado headquarters to answer children’s burning questions.