Every Christmas Eve, children around the world wait for a visitor to arrive through the chimney via reindeer-drawn sleigh, or whatever other means of entry and travel local custom dictates. Santa exists in the hearts and minds of these children. And they like to keep tabs on the jolly man in the red suit. They write him letters at his North Pole address starting in November or December, of course, but there’s more that they can do. Since Christmas Eve 1955, children call up the United States military to ask for his current location because the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), headquartered in Colorado, tracks St. Nick’s every move that night. They now have a website, www.noradsanta.org, set up for the event, and even make faux videos of Santa delivering gifts on his tour around the globe.
Even though the “tracking” is only slightly more real than Santa himself, this seems like a strange use of multibillion-dollar defense technology and associated personnel. After all, NORAD was a Cold War creation, aimed at defending the U.S. and Canadian airspace from Soviets, not Santas. How did it get in the business of tracking reindeer? Easily: just start with a typo, and add a military officer with a good sense for making kids smile.
On Christmas Eve 1955, Sears ran an advertisement in a newspaper in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The advertisement invited children to call Santa, “direct,” on his “private phone,” “any time, day or night.” Many children took up the invitation, the first one being a young girl.
The man on the other end of the phone wasn’t clad in red. The phone, however, was. The phone number in the advertisement was incorrect, and instead of calling the Sears Santa Hotline, as Mentalfloss reports, the child had called a phone at NORAD—and not just any phone. The number led to a red emergency phone typically reserved for incoming messages from the Pentagon or other higher-ups in the military.
The colonel in charge, Harry Shoup—once he figured out that it was a wrong number and not a prank—played along. He told the young caller that he was, indeed, Santa (sometimes it’s okay when members of the military lie to citizens) and asked her if she had been good. The two spoke a bit further—about cookies and reindeer, of course—and then Santa Shoup and the girl both hung up.
Then the phone rang again. It was—again—not the Pentagon.
Shoup took the initiative and assigned others to man the phone, speaking to the callers as Santa. The goodwill gesture resonated throughout NORAD’s halls and became an annual tradition. Every year, hundreds of volunteers man the phones (and now, e-mail), answering when children call. According to the Huffington Post, volunteers are given an “11-page playbook [that] includes a list of nearly 20 questions and answers, including how old is Santa (at least 16 centuries) and has Santa ever crashed into anything (no).”
Want to write a letter to Santa? You can—and you’ll probably get a reply. After receiving a lot of letters for the jolly man in the red suit in 1974, members of Canada Post’s Montreal office decided to write back, hoping to keep children from being disappointed. In 1983, Canada Post took the program national, establishing a program to reply to all letters addressed to Santa. To streamline the process—which, given the million-letter volume, is necessary—Canada Post set up a special mailing address. You can write to St. Nick at “Santa Claus, the North Pole, Canada,” with postal code H0H 0H0.