On December 24, 1955, the phones at the Colorado Springs, Colorado Sears department store were painfully silent. Normally they wouldn’t be expecting an inordinate number of calls on Christmas Eve, but this year they had created an ingenious marketing stunt. They had publicized, through advertisements in the local paper, that children could call their number to speak to Santa Claus. The reason they didn’t speak to any children that night is because, somewhere in the process of making the advertisement, someone made the grave error of writing in the wrong phone number. When children picked the phone that night and dialed the advertised number, instead of reaching Santa Claus (or someone portraying the role at least) they were connected to the Colorado Springs branch of the Continental Air Defense Command.
Luckily for the children who called in, the man in charge that night had a good sense of humor. Colonel Harry Shoup, upon hearing there had been an influx of calls from children asking to speak to Santa Claus, instructed his staff not to deny the request, but to offer Santa’s location on the radar instead. He also decided not to have Sears change the ad, and began running his own ad in subsequent years for children to call in to speak with volunteer Air Force and military personnel and learn the location of Santa Claus on the NORAD scopes.
The tradition has grown immensely. In 2008, over 1,000 volunteers converged on Colorado Springs to sit in the NORAD station there to answer phones and provide email updates to children calling in. There is a website with a Santa Cam, live updated maps showing his location, and even mock radar maps available to view. There are also a host of corporate sponsors - no tax dollars are spent tracking the fictional character - who provide dedicated Santa tracking apps and information. Even though the NORAD tracking is now distributed via the internet and apps, the hotline still received over one hundred and seventeen thousand calls last year, a great deal more than when it all started as a wrong number back in 1955.