[On 24 December, I watched PBS News Hour with a
segment called “On Christmas Eve, a
special look at the origins of NORAD’s Santa tracker.” It was a story narrated by three children of one
of the commanders in charge of an early warning radar system of NORAD. They recalled a surprising phone call their
dad received one night in November.
[Figuring that many people hadn’t heard the story, I thought it would make a good entry for Rick On Theater at Christmastime. I’d have liked to post it on the 23rd, the slot on ROT closest to Christmas Day, but that date had passed and I’d already started a three-part series (“Go-won-go Mohawk (1859-1924),” 23, 26, and 29 December). So I’m posting it now, a little late for Christmas 2024 . . . but think of it as a little early for next Christmas.]
Depending on where you come from, what country or national origin, if you believe in Santa Claus or Father Christmas, or just like the legend, you think the Jolly Old Elf lives in various places. Most Americans say he lives at the North Pole, and people in a large number of other countries and cultures—those that say Santa is the Christmastime gift-bringer—agree.
This story is for those of us who say Santa lives at the North Pole, mostly for residents of Canada and the United States. That’s because it’s about NORAD’s Santa-tracker, which traces his route from the North Pole all around the world delivering presents to the boys and girls on his Nice List. Brief updates are televised all Christmas Eve and there are websites, including NORAD’s own, that show the progress of Santa’s sleigh along its whole trip.
NORAD, of course, is the North American Aerospace Defense Command, established binationally by Canada and the United States in 1958 and headquartered at Peterson Space Force Base (renamed from Peterson Air Force Base in 2021) near Colorado Springs, Colorado. Its principal mission is to provide aerospace and maritime warning, air sovereignty, and protection for Canada and the Continental United States.
(From 1954 to 1958, NORAD’s predecessor was the Continental Air Defense Command, or CONAD, a solely U.S. operation. Until March 1981, NORAD was known as the North American Air Defense Command.)
But in 1955, something happened that gave CONAD and then NORAD a new kind of supplemental purpose.
On the night of 30 November that year—a wire story datelined the next day confirms the date—while Air Force Colonel Harry W. Shoup (1917-2009), operations commander at CONAD, was on duty in the Combat Alert Center at Ent Air Force Base, one of the telephones on his desk rang.
“I remember two phones on his desk,” said Terri Van Keuren, then 65 and one of Shoup’s three daughters, on a 2014 StoryCorps broadcast on National Public Radio (which was also the text of the News Hour segment). “One was this red phone. Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the number.”
“This is a top secret line,” explained a curator of the Canada Aviation and Space Museum, on a 2023 CBC News broadcast, a division of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “So when it rings, that [normally] means bad news.”
“This was the fifties, this was the Cold War,” pointed out Shoup’s son, Richard, 59 at the time of the StoryCorps recording. Tensions with the USSR were heightening, along with fears of nuclear war, so everyone figured a call to the hotline could mean an imminent Soviet attack.
When the emergency-only “red phone” rang on that day a little over 69 years ago, all eyes at the operations center turned to Colonel Shoup, said the curator at the Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa.
As Pamela Farrell, then 70 and another of Shoup’s daughters, recollects the tale, her dad picked up the receiver and said, “This is Colonel Shoup.” And then there was a childish voice that asked, “Is this Santa Claus?”
At first, his children recalled, Shoup thought the call was a prank and he confronted the child, a young boy, more gruffly than he later reported. According to the Associated Press, an International News Service story from 1 December 1955 published in the Pasadena [California] Independent reported that the boy asked if there was a Santa Claus at the North Pole, Shoup answered much the way one might expect from a military officer with the responsibility for ordering a strike that could end life on Earth.
“There may be a guy called Santa Claus at the North Pole,” Colonel Shoup barked, “but he’s not the one I worry about coming from that direction.”
The child could be heard bursting into tears. Shoup quickly switched gears and bellowed “Ho, Ho, Ho!” taking on the role of jolly old Saint Nick. The boy paused, then said, “Hey, you’re not Santa,” Shoup told the AP in 1999.
Realizing that the call wasn’t a put-on or a hoax, Shoup went on: “Yes, I am Santa Claus. Have you been a good boy?” Then he spoke to his mother.
She told him that Sears, Roebuck and Co. had run an ad in the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph listing a hotline kids could call to talk to Santa Claus. But the ad contained a typo in the hotline number, and the kids who called in reached CONAD’s hotline instead.
The ad, which featured a photorealistic drawing of Santa, read:
HEY, KIDDIES!
Call
me on my private phone and I will talk to you personally any time day or night....
Santa Claus
After that, recalled Shoup, fifty calls a day for Santa came into the ops center. Shoup’s daughter Patricia Farrell said her father “put a couple of airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus.” Her sister, Terri Van Keuren, remembered that when her “very straight-laced, very disciplined” father did that, the airmen thought, “The old man’s really flipped his lid this time. We’re answering Santa calls,” and it became a matter of humor in the center.
In the days before computers and GPS, CONAD used a large, plexiglass map of North America to plot unidentified objects. On the morning of Christmas Eve (the day before my ninth birthday), an ops center staffer playfully drew Santa and his sleigh and reindeer over the North Pole on the map.
When Shoup came in and saw the grease-pencil sketch, a lieutenant colonel offered to take it down. Van Keuren reported that her father contemplated at the map for a while and then responded, “You leave it right there.” He first called the CONAD Public Affairs Office and then a local radio station and said, “This is the commander at the Combat Alert Center and we have an unidentified flying object.” He added with a laugh, “Why, it looks like a sleigh.”
Through the CONAD PAO and the wire services, Shoup put out the word:
CONAD, Army, Navy and Marine Air Forces will continue to track and guard Santa and his sleigh on his trip to and from the U.S. against possible attack from those who do not believe in Christmas.
Instead of getting the Sears ad pulled, according to Snopes, a website that fact-checks and investigates urban legends, hoaxes, and folklore, Colonel Shoup decided to offer the boys and girls information about Santa’s movement en route from the North Pole.
On that first Christmas of CONAD/NORAD’s tracking of Santa Claus, the Associated Press syndicated a report on his journey, datelined 23 December 1955 from Colorado Springs (posted on Gizmodo, a design, technology, science, and science fiction blog):
Colorado Springs, Colo., Dec 23 (AP) — Santa Claus Friday [the 23rd] was assured safe passage into the United States by the Continental Air Defense Combat Operations Center here which began plotting his journey from the North Pole early Friday morning.
CONAD said first
reports of its radar and ground observer outposts indicate Santa was traveling
about 45 knots at an altitude of 35,000 feet and should arrive in the United
States early Saturday night for his annual visit.
. . . .
And Santa’s track, being plotted here on the main surveillance board, is a very wide one, indicating that his sleigh is heavily loaded with toys and goodies.
As NORAD Tracks Santa, the Command’s official Santa site, puts it: “. . . and a tradition was born.”
Although, it really wasn’t quite yet. Shoup hadn’t planned on repeating the event the next year. He figured it was a one-off and Christmas 1956 would be run-of-the-mill. In the fall, however, the Public Affairs Officer told him that both the Associated Press and United Press International were waiting to hear that CONAD would remount the Santa-tracking.
Since CONAD wanted to raise its public profile—and what better way than (as Gizmodo’s Matt Novak put it) to let U.S. parents respond to their kids who ask what CONAD (and now NORAD) is that “those are the people who help Santa” rather than, “those are the people who are ensuring our second strike [sic] capabilities after you and everyone in your play group are turned to dust by a nuclear attack.”
So, the PAO convinced Colonel Shoup, and he acquiesced.
Then a tradition was launched. It continued when NORAD was formed in 1958 and took over the special Christmas Eve mission from CONAD and in 1981, when the North American Air Defense Command became the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
Well, that’s the story as Colonel Shoup, his family, and NORAD’s PAO usually tell it. More or less, anyway.
Over the years, Shoup embellished the tale and edited it a little. Other details may have been fudged from the start. Certainly, the Shoup children, who gave us the narrative aired by NPR in 2014 and that PBS used for its 2024 segment last month, weren’t in the ops center when it all went down—unauthorized personnel, not even the CO’s kids, would have been allowed in the room. Besides, they’d have only been 6, 11, and 16 at the time.
Gizmodo declares that the flawed origin story of NORAD’s Santa-tracker is “morphing and warping with each new re-telling.” Just google “NORAD Tracks Santa” and read just a few of the accounts and you’ll see that the blog is right.
(Incidentally, NORAD used to work with Google in the middle of the 2000s, but they split. Now Google launched a competing Santa-tracker in December 2004 called . . . well, Google Santa Tracker.)
The main details are confirmed: there was a phone call from a child, the cartoon on the plexiglass map was real, and Shoup did start the Santa-tracking program, with the support of CONAD’s PAO and the commanding general, who saw an opportunity to raise unit morale and gain a publicity boost at the same time.
And let’s give credit where credit is due. Yoni Appelbaum of The Atlantic observed that Shoup, “had a flair for public relations” (“Yes, Virginia, There Is a NORAD,” 21 Dec. 2015). He’d displayed his acumen before on a number of occasions, Appelbaum reported—and been commended on it. In the New York Times, presidential historian Michael Beschloss labeled Shoup “a media pro” (“How Santa Claus Ended Up on Norad’s Radar,” 20 Dec. 2015, “Sunday Business”: 5).
But in the telling of the Santa-call caper, sometimes the caller was a boy and sometimes it was a girl. (I also mention in passing above that Shoup changed his explanation of how he greeted that first caller. At first he seemed to acknowledge that he addressed the child sharply, but later his recollection was that he was immediately receptive to the kid’s story.) Regardless of gender, what the caller said changes somewhat depending on who’s telling the story—or when.
So does when the event took place—because it didn’t happen on Christmas Eve, as so many of the latter-day retellings would have it. The wire story that the Pasadena Independent published on 1 December 1955 (and was reported by Gizmodo) proves that Shoup’s call came in on 30 November—3½ weeks earlier.
And speaking of that telephone call: there are a couple of things about that, too. First, it’s uncertain whether the Sears ad printed the wrong number by accident, or the caller misdialed one digit. Both versions circulate even today. Apparently, no one’s sure. Even Shoup had told both cases.
That may be because it’s highly unlikely that the call even came in on the alert phone. As Atlantic’s Appelbaum points out, the red phone was connected to the commanding general of the Strategic Air Command and the Pentagon via “a dedicated, lead-encased cable” that no one other than the SAC four-star and the DOD in Washington could connect to. Even if you had the “number.”
(Those hotline phones don’t have telephone numbers like your home or office phone and mine do—seven digits and an area code. Most are dedicated lines that only have one receiving instrument. The calling officer just picks up the receiver at his end and the phone at the other end buzzes or sounds off in whatever way it’s rigged to do. If there’s a case, like, say, POTUS or the Secretary of Defense, who has more than one line he or she can reach, there’s a code of some kind to make the connection, not an ordinary phone number.)
No, the Santa call almost certainly came in to one of the other phones on Shoup’s desk, which would have an unlisted number that, if she or he had it or stumbled on it, someone could connect to it by mistake. (This way, when Shoup told his airmen to take the Santa calls, they could do so with the phones at their desks or stations. Otherwise, they’d have to all be sitting at Shoup’s desk or dash over every time the phone rang. That’s just nuts! Besides, I doubt that the CONAD command would have countenanced using the hotline phone for a publicity stunt. What if there were an emergency?)
The Atlantic also doubts that there was a “flood of calls” that followed that first one on that first day. They argue, based on the theory that the initial connection was the result of a misdialed number, not a misprint, and that it isn’t logical that more children would make the same mistake. (Of course, if the number was misprinted in the newspaper, then there could have been additional calls, but the magazine has dismissed that as unlikely. But not impossible . . . .)
No, Appelbaum posits that the “flood” came later after Shoup took advantage of the happenstance and publicized the Santa line.
In any case, many students of Christmas tradition note that the Shoup-Santa story and the NORAD outgrowth is one of the few modern additions to the Santa Claus legend that’s actually become part of the lore.
Over the years, the publicity effort to bring children and families into NORAD Tracks Santa got bigger and more sophisticated. It started out with just notices in newspapers every Christmas Eve. Then, in the 1960s, NORAD sent radio stations records so that they could broadcast Santa’s progress between Christmas music.
Meanwhile, the Air Force still sent out press releases so that the papers could plaster stories around the world. By the 1970s, NORAD introduced 3-minute television commercials showing jets intercepting a foreign aircraft on Christmas Eve that stations around the U.S. could air.
In the 1990s, NORAD’s Santa-tracker took to the World Wide Web. NORAD Tracks Santa moved online in 1997.
Including its three years under CONAD, 2024 was NORAD Tracks Santa’s 69th year on Santa watch. The website, https://www.noradsanta.org, is now off line until 1 December 2025. When it’s reactivated, visitors can watch Santa’s progress around the globe on Christmas Eve from 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. on Christmas Day, Mountain Standard Time, as he delivers presents to the world’s children—in nine languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese.
Saint Nick-watchers can also follow the trip on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/noradsanta), YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/NORADTracksSanta), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/noradtrackssanta_official), and X (https://x.com/NoradSanta). People can also call 1-877-HI-NORAD (1-877-446-6723) to ask live operators about Santa’s location on 24 December from 6 a.m. to midnight, Mountain Time.
Every year since 1958, NORAD has kept millions of children and families across the world apprised of Santa’s location on 24 December. NORAD Tracks Santa subsists because of the support, services, and resources provided by volunteers and its government and corporate contributors. NORAD Tracks Santa is financed by neither American nor Canadian taxpayers.
Typically, around 1,200 to 1,500 volunteers work at NORAD Tracks Santa each year, primarily consisting of military and civilian personnel from NORAD. That many are needed because, said the public affairs specialist who ran the program in 2009, “Literally, when a volunteer puts the phone down after they get done with a call, it’s ringing again” (Daniel Terdiman, “Behind the scenes: NORAD's Santa tracker,” CNN 24 Dec. 2009).
Each year, the NORAD Tracks Santa website gets several million visitors from over 200 countries and territories around the world. Volunteers answer more than 130,000 calls to the NORAD Tracks Santa hotline (see above) from boys and girls around the globe. What started because of a child’s misdirected phone call has flourished and is recognized as one of the U.S. Department of Defense’s largest community outreach programs. Textbooks for public relations courses cite NORAD Tracks Santa as a superb example of a Christmas-themed PR campaign.
In an interview with the Associated Press (reported in the AP article cited above), Air Force Lieutenant General Case Cunningham explained that NORAD radars in Alaska and Canada, of which he’s in command, are the first to detect Santa. Santa leaves the North Pole and typically heads for the International Dateline in the Pacific Ocean. From there he moves west, following the night.
“That’s when the satellite systems we use to track and identify targets of interest every single day start to kick in,” Cunningham said. “A probably little-known fact is that Rudolph’s nose that glows red emanates a lot of heat. And so those satellites track (Santa) through that heat source.”
NORAD puts out
that it uses three systems to track Santa on his Christmas Eve journey:
• Radar (i.e., North Warning System – radar stations along the North American
Arctic regions in Alaska and northern Canada)
• Satellites
• NORAD aircraft (American and Canadian fighters; American refueling tankers; and AWACS, the surveillance, command, control, and communications aircraft)
(Of course, we grown-ups know that the website only simulates the tracking of Santa.)
A caveat: an observation from which I stayed away in this post is the main topic of Matt Novak’s article on Gizmodo. The title of his post is “How the US Military Turned Santa Claus Into a Cold War Icon, published on 23 December 2014. As you might guess, Novak is distressed about the militarization of Santa Claus at the hands of NORAD and Harry Shoup’s successors. He’s not wrong, and he makes a good argument for his concern.
I didn’t bring this issue up because my interest for Rick On Theater is just the story, not its impact on the legend of Saint Nicholas. Perhaps I’ve got blinders on, but that’s where I stand as far as this post is concerned. But, then, I have no children and it’s been a long time since I was one. Christmas to me is only the day when I turn a year older.
But back to Novak and his point. (Several other writers whose reports on the CONAD/NORAD project I read raise this issue as well, but the Gizmodo blogger focused on it.)
He pointed out that in its advertising of NORAD Tracks Santa, the Air Force was “heavily promoting the idea that Santa Claus was a Cold Warrior.” He described “a rather alarming video” during one holiday period “showing fighter jets escorting Santa.”
Novak also invokes “children’s advocacy groups like Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood,” who, he asserts, “said they were uncomfortable with the violent undertones of the Santa Tracker campaign.”
As NORAD’s response, Novak quoted a spokesman as saying to the AP: “We really do feel strongly that it’s something that is safe and non-threatening, and not something that would negatively impact children. In fact, we think that it’s a lot of fun.”
Novak doesn’t say so, but it seems he feels that if one follows the NORAD Santa-tracker and visits the website, one’s buying into, and therefore perpetuating the militarizing of Santa Claus. (I embedded the link to Matt Novak’s Gizmodo post above, but here it is again, so you can check out his argument.)
[Harry Wesley Shoup was born on 29 September 1917 in Bessemer, Pennsylvania. He went to Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, where he met Louise Lane, his future wife. He and Lane were married on 8 February 1941 in Montgomery, Alabama, and the couple had three daughters and a son.
[Shoup joined the United States Army Air Corps on 6 June 1940 and served as a fighter pilot in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II. (The USAAC became the USAAF in 1941 and the U.S. Air Force in 1947.) While serving in the Air Force, Shoup received the Soldier’s Medal for saving another airman’s life.
[(The Soldier’s Medal is a decoration of the U.S. Army, but prior to the creation of the Airman’s Medal in 1960, airmen were awarded the Soldier’s Medal. The criteria for the medal are: “The Soldier’s Medal is awarded to any person of the Armed Forces of the United States or of a friendly foreign nation who, while serving in any capacity with the Army of the United States, including Reserve Component soldiers not serving in a duty status at the time of the heroic act, distinguished himself or herself by heroism not involving conflict with an enemy.”)
[Shoup had an illustrious career in the USAF for 28 years, also seeing action in Korea and Vietnam. He became the Commander of the CONAD Combat Alert Center in February 1954 and held that post (after NORAD took over) until June 1965, when he was assigned to the 84th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron at Hamilton Air Force Base in California as Wing Commander. He remained in that post until retiring from the USAF on 1 September 1968.
[Shoup died at age 91 on 14 March 2009 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he and his wife, who died in 2003, had retired in 1983. After Christmas 1955, he had acquired the nickname “The Santa Colonel”; for the remainder of his life, his family says, that was his proudest achievement. Shoup is buried in the Fort Logan National Cemetery in Denver, and his soubriquet is even inscribed on his gravestone.
[I’ve posted other Christmas-related pieces on Rick On Theater over the years. On ROT’s first Christmas, I ran “‘Is There a Santa Claus?‘“ (25 December 2009), the text of the famous letter from little Virginia O’Hanlon in 1897 which asked “Is there a Santa Claus?” and the response from the New York Sun which answered “Yes.” (As it happens, NORAD Tracks Santa sees itself as a follower of that exchange and the sentiment it radiates.)
[Subsequent Christmas posts are “‘It’s a Wonderful Life Was Based on a ‘Christmas Card’ Short Story by Philip Van Doren Stern‘“ by Daven Hiskey (26 December 2016), “‘Despite the Pandemic, It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like “Christmas Carol”‘“ by Jerald Raymond Pierce (27 December 2020), and “Spirit of 1907 Christmas, Recovered in 1999, Completed in 2016“ (21 December 2022).
[And in the spirit of Christmukkah, the convergence of Christmas and the first night or day of Hanukkah, as we had in 2024, I include “Dreidel“ (6 January 2024) in this list.]
