Tracking Santa's travels is a celebrated tradition at the North American Aerospace Command, and it unfolds Friday for the 55th year.
NORAD insiders drop hints about how they do it - "ultra-cool, high-tech, high-speed digital cameras," radar, satellites and Canadian Forces fighter jets. They happily release a flurry of facts: They answered 74,000 phone calls and 3,500 e-mails from around the world last year, all asking for Santa's location.
But any inquiry into the technological particulars is met with a polite rebuff and a cryptic explanation involving the magic of Christmas.
NORAD Tracks Santa, the official name of the exercise, began in 1955 when a Colorado Springs newspaper ad invited kids to talk to Santa on a hotline. The phone number had a typo, and dozens of kids wound up dialing the Continental Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado Springs, the predecessor to NORAD.
The officers on duty played along and began passing along reports on Santa's progress. It's now a cherished ritual at NORAD, a joint U.S.-Canada command that monitors the North American skies and seas from a control center at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs.
"It's really ingrained in the NORAD psyche and culture," said Canadian Forces Lt. Gen. Marcel Duval, the deputy commander of NORAD, who pitches in to field French-language calls on Christmas Eve. "It's a goodwill gesture from all of us, on our time off, to all the kids on the planet."
It's also one of the few modern additions to the centuries-old Santa Claus story that have stuck, said Gerry Bowler, a history professor at the University of Manitoba and the author of "Santa Claus: A Biography."
Most embellishments never capture the public's imagination because they tend to be ad campaigns or movies that try to "kidnap" Santa for commercial purposes, Bowler said.
NORAD, by contrast, takes an essential element of the Santa Claus story - his travels on Christmas Eve
- and looks at it through a technological lens, Bower said.
"It brought Santa into the 20th century," he said.
And into the 21st century. Santa Tracks NORAD now has a Twitter account, a Facebook page, a Youtube channel and apps for mobile phones, along with a website, http://www.noradsanta.org, and the phone line, 877-HI NORAD.
More than 13 million unique visitors went to the website last December. NORAD Tracks Santa has more than 470,000 "likes" on Facebook this year and more than 30,000 followers on Twitter.
It takes four months of planning to marshal the 1,200 volunteers, 100 telephones, 30 laptops and two big projection TV screens the exercise requires, NORAD spokeswoman Joyce Frankovis said. All the labor is volunteer. Google, Verizon, Air Canada, defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton and others chip in.
The phone line is still at the core of NORAD Tracks Santa. Volunteers answer calls in two-hour shifts from 2 a.m. Mountain Time on Christmas Eve until 3 a.m. Christmas Day.
