And once again, NORAD is tracking him, marking the 50th Santa Tracking Season for the North American Air Defense. Click here for the official NORAD Santa Tracking Map, and links. You can also download videos of Santa's previous stops from that site. The video for the Himalayas, where NORAD has Santa as I write this, includes a very clever plug for kids to eat their vegetables. Those guys are sneaky. They also slip some geography lessons in there.
Kids can also call Santa's hotline toll-free 1-877-HI-NORAD, or 719-474-2111 if you are in the Colorado local area. For anyone wondering, the hotlines are all staffed by volunteers.
Why, you may ask, do the people who are in charge of aerospace defense in the US and Canada track Santa Claus every Christmas Eve? Seems it was the result of a 50-year-old typo. In 1955, a store in Colorado Springs, Colorado (right near Cheyenne Mountain, home of NORAD and fictional home of the Stargate Command) printed a phone number for kids to call Santa, except they misprinted the phone number and inadvertently directed the kiddies to call the operations hotline for Commander in Chief of the Continental Air Defense, the predecessor of NORAD. Rather than dash Christmas for the kids, the Colonel got in the game and "found" radar information that tracked Santa. The full story from NORAD can be found here.
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