Today in 1955, in Colorado Springs, Colorado

NORAD (the “North American Air Defense Command”) began tracking Santa for the first time in what would become an annual Christmas Eve tradition.

Operation Track Santa

The program began  when a Sears department store placed an advertisement in a Colorado Springs newspaper which told children that they could telephone Santa Claus and included a number for them to call. However, the telephone number printed was misprinted and calls instead came through to Colorado Springs’ Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) Center. Colonel Harry Shoup, who was on duty that night, told his staff to give all children who called in a “current location” for Santa Claus. This began a tradition which continued when NORAD replaced CONAD in 1958.

 

Today, NORAD relies on volunteers to make the program possible and it incorporates Web-based and mobile versions.  But, it’s the telephone volunteers who make it come to life. Each volunteer handles about forty telephone calls per hour, and the team typically handles more than 12,000 e-mails and more than 70,000 telephone calls from more than two hundred countries and territories. Most of these contacts happen during the twenty-five hours from 2 a.m. on December 24 until 3 a.m. MST on December 25. The volunteers include NORAD military and civilian personnel.

[December 24, 1955]