Santa Is Coming To Town – Track Him With Norad

Just a quick one for all those who are waiting for SANTA:

Welcome to NORAD Tracks Santa

lol...

Several years ago, we added another holiday tradition to our list — helping NORAD keep tabs on Santa every Christmas Eve.NORAD’s Santa-tracking dates back to 1955, when a Sears and Roebuck magazine ad in Colorado Springs accidentally directed readers to call NORAD instead of the “Talk-to-Santa” hotline they were advertising. Embracing the holiday spirit, the folks at NORAD provided callers with Santa’s location according to their radar and have tracked his journey ever since. Many years later, in 2004, the same holiday spirit inspired us to use Google Earth — it was called “Keyhole Earth Viewer” back then — to display Santa’s voyage around the world on Christmas Eve. Google hosted the entire tracker on a single machine and were excited to have an audience of 25,000 following St. Nick’s flight with us that night.

Source: epidemicfun.com with story, clip & link to the main NORAD Santa site.

I always loved how they did this.... Pretty cool really....

I saw this too late after Christmas. Very cute. I got to watch the video of him in Venezuela though. laughs.

**Old Person Alert**

It must have been 1958 or '59, when I became aware of NORAD's ability to track the man himself, before I became aware he didn't really exist. I thought it was neat, and, boy, was I excited to know that something as important as the military was also concerned about Santa's flight and put technology to work so kiddies could exclaim, "See, he does exist, and our military knows where he is using radar!"

Must have been only a couple years later, when I seriously had my doubts about flying reindeer, or quit believing altogether, and I found myself having to practice "duck and cover" in school, listening to talk about how to build and stock a backyard bomb shelter, and wondering when "the bomb" would find me. Maybe I quit believing in NORAD, too, or at least had serious doubts about it being able to save my family from nuclear attack.

I would see Saturday afternoon movies on tv, like "Strategic Air Command", which made me proud, but I remained in fear. Decades later, when my own kids believed in Santa, I found out that NORAD still tracked him, but they didn't show any interest in the event as I did. No, by then they had their own computers and could play their own movies and cartoons anytime by turning on the vcr and inserting the tape themself. All before they quit believing! So much for radar tracking Santa.

Well, thanks to this thread I sure enjoyed finding out that, yes, Virginia, there still is a NORAD tracking of Santa! And, wow, I can even send him to my mobile phone....whatever that means...I better ask my kids.