On December 24, 2025, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, will celebrate seventy years of tracking Santa’s sleigh. According to legend, the tradition of tracking Santa’s sleigh began in November 1955, when a child trying to reach Santa on a telephone hotline advertised by a Sears, Roebuck & Co. store in Colorado transposed two digits. It was not Santa who picked up the phone, but Colonel Harry Shoup of Continental Air Defense Command, known as CONAD, located in Colorado Springs. Shoup was brusque when a small voice asked if he was Santa, but he later recognized that interest in Santa could be an opportunity to call public attention to the air defense system that would shield the U.S. if Soviet bombers were able to reach the country from over the North Pole. After World War II, many Americans were hoping to turn away from world affairs, but U.S. and Canadian leaders worried that North America was vulnerable to an attack from the USSR over the polar region. That wasn’t on many Americans’ radar screens. A few weeks after the young child’s call, Shoup told his public-relations officer to inform the news wire services that CONAD was tracking Santa’s sleigh as it traveled from his home at the North Pole. Reporters loved the story, and the following year they called to see if the trackers would be operational again. In 1957,* Canada and the U.S. formed the North American Air Defense Command, or NORAD. By charting Santa’s ride, the agency illustrated the military’s mission to protect the citizens of the continent by tracking an object traveling from the North Pole, over the Arctic Ocean, to Canada, and beyond. By Christmas Eve 1960, NORAD was posting updates and tracking the flight of “S. Claus.” It reported that the sleigh had made an emergency landing on the ice of Hudson Bay. When Canadian fighter jets stopped by to check on the incident, they found Santa tending to a reindeer’s injured foot. Once the animal was bandaged, the jets escorted Santa’s sleigh as he completed his annual flight. Since then, fighter jets have frequently intercepted the sleigh to salute Santa, who reins in his team to let the slower jets catch up. Over time, NORAD became the North American Aerospace Defense Command, and its mission expanded to include collecting information about the Earth’s atmosphere, coastal waters, and intelligence. It is still key to U.S. and Canadian defense. And what began in 1955 as a way to familiarize war-weary Americans with Cold War–era defense systems has become an operation in which more than 1,000 Canadian and American military personnel, Defense Department civilian workers, and local participants near Colorado Springs, where NORAD is headquartered, volunteer to answer the more than 100,000 phone calls that come from children around the world on Christmas Eve. It is a testament to the longstanding U.S.-Canadian friendship. For one night a year, the hard-edged world of international alliances, intelligence, radar, satellites, and fighter jets turns into a night for adults to create a magical world for children.  Notes: *NORAD operated for seven months before official papers establishing it were exchanged in May 1958. Liza Donnelly’s Seeing Things is key to understanding this crazy moment in our history with color and humor. You can find it here:
Kenneth Schaffel, The Emerging Shield: The Air Force and the Evolution of Continental Air Defense, 1945–1960 (Office of Air Force History, 1991) pp. 57–59, 251–254. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/12/yes-virginia-there-is-a-norad/421161/ https://www.weathernationtv.com/news/track-santa-with-norad-70-years-of-holiday-magic https://www.norad.mil/Newsroom/Fact-Sheets/Article-View/Article/578773/norad-tracks-santa/ You’re currently a free subscriber to Letters from an American. If you need help receiving Letters, changing your email address, or unsubscribing, please visit our Support FAQ. You can also submit a help request directly. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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2025/12/23
December 23, 2025
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