How Does The Santa Tracker Work?

The beloved Santa tracker that the United States has used since 1955 to make kids even more excited for their Christmas presents has an origin in the country’s defense systems. It was designed by NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command), a Cold War program designed to prevent total nuclear annihilation.

It began as an accident.

In 1955, the phone number of Continental Air Command in Colorado Springs, Colo., which eventually was rebranded as NORAD, mistakenly ended up in a Sears ad encouraging children to call Santa, so children called the military installation.

NPR recently broadcast an interview detailing the event. They spoke with Terri Van Keuren, Pam Farrell and Rick Shoup. Their father, Col. Harry Shoup, worked at the Continental Air Command.

Terri remembers her dad had two phones on his desk, including a red one. “Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the number,” she says.

“This was the ’50s, this was the Cold War, and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on the United States,” Rick says. 

The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. “And then there was a small voice that just asked, ‘Is this Santa Claus?’ “

His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.

“And Dad realized that it wasn’t a joke,” her sister says. “So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho’d and asked if he had been a good boy and, ‘May I talk to your mother?’ And the mother got on and said, ‘You haven’t seen the paper yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ Dad looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus.”

 

It became one of the biggest PR boons for the military in history. As Matt Novak, who wrote an expansive piece on the history of the Santa Tracker said, “The mistaken call’s real value was in planting the seed of a Santa idea. Who better than Ol’ Saint Nick to join the fight against the godless commies in the Soviet Union? The phone call happened on November 30, 1955 but that coming Christmas Eve, the military embraced this idea of Santa being protected by American forces. Santa was enlisted as a character that would help fight the good fight against non-believers.”