Santa Claus, snug in his cherry-red sleigh and trailing nine reindeer, was soaring through the night sky over Madagascar early Tuesday afternoon Eastern Standard Time — at least according to a Santa Tracker from the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
The command, known as NORAD, a defense organization operated jointly by the United States and Canada, has traced Santa’s magical journey around the world for more than six decades.
Its modern-day service, including an online visual that shows Saint Nicholas and his reindeer powering across a three-dimensional world map, is viewable here. The online tracker has a running count of Santa’s gift deliveries. NORAD is also taking calls at a telephone hotline: 1-877-446-6723. The command warned on Tuesday that some callers were receiving messages that they could not be connected, but it urged anxious Santa trackers to stay on the phone. “Don’t hang up — those sleigh bells will ring, and we’ll answer you soon,” NORAD wrote on social media.
This year, Santa departed the North Pole at 6 a.m. E.S.T., the command said. The tracker is scheduled to shut down at 2 a.m. Christmas morning.
“Santa has just departed from the North Pole and is currently headed toward Chatham Island off of the coast of New Zealand,” Capt. Sable Brown of the defense command said in an early-morning radio update. She cited “NORAD satellites and Santa Cam footage.”
NORAD, typically tasked with defending North American airspace from foreign threats, has tracked Santa’s Christmas Eve journey since the command was established in 1958.
It inherited the charming enterprise from a precursor, the Continental Air Defense Command, which stumbled into the job through a typographical error in a newspaper advertisement.
It was December 1955 when Col. Harry W. Shoup of the Continental Air Defense Command received a call on a red telephone at his windowless command post in Colorado Springs.
The phone was intended to be used as part of an alert system if the Soviet Union staged a surprise attack against the United States. But when Colonel Shoup picked up the phone, he was met by a less alarming message.
“Are you Santa Claus?” a small voice at the other end of the call asked, according to an account of the incident published in 2021 by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The number for the command — ME 2-6681 — had been printed in a local Sears, Roebuck and Co. newspaper advertisement, which described the line as a private phone number for Santa.
Colonel Shoup, who would later come to be known as the Santa Colonel, recognized that the advertisement could lead to many more calls. He told his team that each child who dialed the number should be informed of Santa’s coordinates.
Today, NORAD’s system is far more sophisticated, with a website that receives millions of page views. Volunteers for the Santa Tracker phone hotline field more than 100,000 calls from children across the globe in an average year, according to the U.S. military. Thousands had already come through Tuesday, NORAD said.
The scale of the effort is significant: The Army has said the tracker is supported by the volunteer work of more than 1,500 members of the armed forces and their families.
For a few years, some children who called the NORAD line were greeted by a quite prominent volunteer Santa tracker: Michelle Obama, then the first lady, who took calls from Hawaii.
“Hello, this is first lady Michelle Obama with NORAD Tracks Santa,” she would say as she fielded calls, according to NORAD statements. “How may I help you?”
Santa’s flight was going smoothly, she reported each year.
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