NORAD Tracks Santa

The emblem of NORAD Tracks Santa,.

NORAD Tracks Santa is an annual Christmas-themed entertainment program produced under the auspices of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Every year on Christmas Eve, "NORAD Tracks Santa" purports to follow Santa Claus as he leaves the North Pole and delivers presents to children around the world. The program starts on December 1 with a "Countdown Village" website.

The program is in the tradition of the September 1897 editorial "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" in the New York Sun.

History and overview

1955 Sears ad with the misprinted telephone number that led to
 the NORAD Tracks Santa Program

According to NORAD's official web page on the NORAD Tracks Santa program, the service began on December 24, 1955. A Sears department store placed an advertisement in a Colorado Springs newspaper. The advertisement told children that they could telephone Santa Claus and included a number for them to call. However, the telephone number printed was incorrect and calls instead came through to Colorado Spring's Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) Center. Colonel Shoup, who was on duty that night, told his staff to give all children that called in a "current location" for Santa Claus. A tradition began which continued when the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) replaced CONAD in 1958.

NORAD relies on volunteers to make the program possible. Many volunteers are employees at Cheyenne Mountain and Peterson Air Force Base. Each volunteer handles about forty telephone calls per hour, and the team typically handles more than 12,000 e-mails and more than 70,000 telephone calls from more than two hundred countries and territories. Most of these contacts happen during the twenty-five hours from 2 a.m. on December 24 until 3 a.m. MST on December 25. Google Analytics has been in use since December 2007 to analyze traffic at the NORAD Tracks Santa website. As a result of this analysis information, the program can project and scale volunteer staffing, telephone equipment, and computer equipment needs for Christmas Eve.

By December 25, 2009, the NORAD Tracks Santa program had 27,440 twitter followers and the Facebook page had more than 410,700 fans.

Website and other media

This publicity picture for NORAD Tracks Santa shows two Northeastern Air Defense Sector
members with radarequipment in December 2008,.

The NORAD Tracks Santa program has always made use of a variety of media. From the 1950s to 1996, these were the telephone hotline, newspapers, radio, phonograph records and television. Many television newscasts in North America feature NORAD Tracks Santa as part of their weather updates on Christmas Eve.

From 1997 to the present, the program has had a highly publicized internet presence. As mobile media and social media have become popular and widespread as methods of direct communication, these newer media have also been embraced by the program.The layout of the NORAD Tracks Santa website and its webpages have changed from 1997 to the present due to changes in internet technologies, and changes in partners and sponsors for a particular year.

From mid-January until November 30, when one arrives at the NORAD Tracks Santa website, one is greeted with a message to come back on 1 December to "track Santa with NORAD". During December one finds a NORAD Tracks Santa website with all the features available.

On Christmas Eve, the NORAD Tracks Santa website videos page is generally updated each hour, when it is midnight in a different time zone. The "Santa Cam" videos show CGI images of Santa Claus flying over famous landmarks. Each video is accompanied by a voice-over, typically done by NORAD personnel, giving a few facts about the city or country depicted.[8] Celebrity voice-overs have also been used over the years. For the London "Santa Cam" video, English television personality and celebrity Jonathan Ross did the voice-over for 2005 to 2007 and the former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr narrated the same video in 2003 and 2004. In 2002, Aaron Carter provided the voice-over for three videos.

The locations and landmarks depicted in some of the "Santa Cam" videos have changed over the years. In 2009, twenty-nine "Santa Cam" videos were posted on the website. In previous years, twenty-four to twenty-six videos had been posted.

Sponsorship and publicity

This publicity picture shows two members of Canadian
 Forces with radar screens.

NORAD Tracks Santa relies on corporate sponsorship, and is not financed by American and Canadian taxpayers.

U.S. military units that have provided publicity for the program include the Northeast Air Defense Sector of the New York Air National Guard and the U.S. Naval Reserve Navy Information Bureau (NIB) 1118 at Fort Carson, Colorado. Other U.S. federal agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), have also publicized the service, as have the Canadian Forces.

(source:wikipedia)

Santa Claus in Our House

Santa-claus

I was at a holiday party the other night when a friend sighed and declared, “Gotta go home and move the elf.”

I couldn’t help but shake my head a little and sigh to myself, admittedly with an air of righteousness, knowing we’d never say that in my home.

My husband didn’t understand the reference, so I explained to him what “Elf on a Shelf” was, to the best of my knowledge.

“So, basically they use scare tactics and bribery to get their kids to behave?” he paraphrased. And I nodded, again with a slight air of disbelief.

Another friend of mine has a direct line to Santa. She calls him periodically and loudly proclaims, “Hi Santa, it’s Gigi’s mom….” More rapid than eagles, little Gigi gets to work doing whatever Mommy asked her to do in the first place. I can’t help but wonder how Gigi will behave come December 26th.

Meanwhile, in our home, my husband and I work very hard to encourage our kids simply to be good for — to quote a popular Christmas song — goodness’ sake. Throughout the day, when my two-year-old son cries, I ask my four-year-old daughter if she can think of a way to make him feel better. The slightest hug or kiss from her is all my son needs to immediately pop back to happiness. And then I’ll quietly nudge my daughter and point out: “You did that! You got him to feel good again.” And we share a quick, tender smile before she goes back to being a robot or astronaut or baker.

My two-year-old was born into the loving and kind family environment my husband and I try to maintain. When he hears a kid cry, he automatically pouts in empathy. He is quick to dole out hugs or kisses to people he knows when he sees them in distress. And, of the few dozen words he uses, “I’m sorry” are two.

So the notion of encouraging my kids to be good in order to make Santa’s “nice” list really troubles me. Not only does it completely undermine my authority, but it’s pure extrinsic motivation.

My friend thinks it’s truly sad that I have robbed my children of the magic of the holiday.

I am not trying to pretend that my kids are saints, always behaving appropriately out of the sheer joy of being nice. Nor do I posit that children who believe in Santa are not otherwise good people. But how kids think of Santa Claus represents, for me, all that is not Christmas spirited: receiving instead of giving, greed instead of gratefulness, idle wanting instead of active contributing. And encouraging my children to write letters to him or make Christmas lists or be good because he’s watching encourages all the wrong things for me. I want whatever goodness does come out of my children, to be for the right reasons. I want them to be people who are simply good and kind and honest, as I try to be (well, most of the time…).

Granted, when I was a child, I believed in Santa, though I realized he was fictitious long before my parents told me. (I remember feeling a little embarrassed for my mother when she finally outed the guy.) But in my naïve days, there was a certain magic about Christmas Day and the night before believing the man would fly to my house and bring me presents because he’d been watching me and knew I’d been good. But had I? Had I been good?

I remember being a child sitting on Santa’s lap at the mall, nervously hoping he’d only heard good things (this, just moments after kicking my sister as we stood in the long line). So then when Santa confirmed I was on the nice list and presents were coming my way, I remember feeling — even as a young child — how I had gotten one over on the old man.

This year, now that my daughter is of an age where she could truly believe in Santa and be consumed by the magic and thrill of believing, I wasn’t willing to let him come down our chimney.

My friend with the ever-watching elf thinks I am cruel. She thinks it’s truly sad that I have robbed my children of the magic of the holiday. But I don’t see it. My kids still enjoy reading about Santa — as much as they enjoy reading about Harold and his purple crayon or The Cat in the Hat, magical characters who are not actually real but still capture a child’s imagination. My kids will still wake up on Christmas morning to see a sparkling tree with a modest bounty of presents underneath.

But more importantly, they will also give gifts to the less fortunate, say thank you for what gifts they receive and continue to be kind and do the right thing. It will be a magical day because we will have a house full of people plus gifts and music and food. The lights will still twinkle and the decorations still shine. No one needs to sit on a shelf or a keep a list for us. The day will be special simply because it’s Christmas — even if Santa skips our house.

(source:babble.com)