Editor’s note: You can follow Santa’s Christmas Eve progress here at the Augusta Press website. We’ll keep the NORAD pinned to the top of the page until Santa is safely back home at the North Pole with eight tiny and exhausted reindeer.
For most of the year, the North American Aerospace Defense Command scans the skies of the United States and Canada for any airborne threats, but it performs it most important duty of the year on Christmas Eve.
That’s when NORAD tracks Santa across the world so that children everywhere can follow the jolly elf’s progress in delivering toys to all the good boys and girls around the world.
The stories vary about how an agency assigned to give first notice of an attack on the United States came to follow the progress of Santa Claus. The best known version is this:
NORAD’s foray into Santa tracking had an uncertain beginning back in 1955, however. In fact, the federal agency never actually intended to track anything other than those airborne threats.
A misprint in a local Sears department store ad changed all that. The ad was supposed to provide a phone number so children could call a number and speak directly to Santa. Instead, the misprinted number was for the red telephone on the desk of Col. Harry Shoup, director of operations for CONAD, the precursor to NORAD.
When that phone rang one Christmas Eve night, Shoup knew it was either the Pentagon or his commanding officer, Gen. Earle Partridge, calling, so when he answered the phone, and a small voice at the other end asked, “Are you really Santa Claus,” he was, well, a bit taken aback. In fact, according to some sources, he thought someone was playing a joke – which would be very out of character for either Partridge or the Pentagon.
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The good-natured colonel played along, answering the child’s questions until she asked one that he figured the real Santa Claus wouldn’t want him to answer. How did Santa make it to leave presents for all children everywhere, she asked. Shoup decided that would be a classified secret at the North Pole, so he told her it was all because of Christmas magic.
Shoup figured that call was some sort of anomaly and wouldn’t happen again, but the phone rang throughout the night, but he got calls steadily all night. After quite a few calls, Shoup gave some of his troops the special assignment of answering the phone. They would answer questions from the children who called, and even gave out information about where Santa Claus was on his journey as they followed him on radar.
What may be a more truthful version of the story is that the phone call was on Nov. 30, 1955, not Christmas Eve, and the caller just made a mistake in dialing (though Snopes, a fact-checking site says there was). Shoup, in this version, wasn’t the kindly Col. Santa, and he had a more expected reaction for a man charged with the security of the United States.
Years later, Shoup’s daughter said the NORAD tradition had its origin in a doodle. Someone at the agency drew Santa Claus and his sleigh on the tracking board, and the colonel, in this version, a public relations whiz, put the word out that his men were tracking Santa so they could protect him from attack by those who didn’t believe in Christmas.
After nearly 70 years, the tradition continues with 1,250 civilian and uniformed volunteers from the United States and Canada.
Scott Hudson is the senior reporter for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
