As it has for seven decades, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) will be the official Santa Tracker, following the flight of jolly old St. Nick and his reindeer as they trek across the country on Christmas Eve.

To celebrate the 70th anniversary of the program, NORAD wants the public to be part of the celebration on its social media platforms.

“We are looking for short (15-30 second) horizontal videos of your most magical holiday moments,” NORAD wrote in a Facebook post, for “a chance to be featured in NORAD Tracks Santa’s 70th Anniversary commemorative video.”

Videos can feature children or pets playing in the snow, youths opening presents or leaving cookies for Santa. The deadline to submit a video for consideration is today, at publicaffairsnorad@gmail.com.

NORAD stressed that by submitting a video, Santa lovers are allowing the trackers permission to include it, and are confirming that every person featured in the video has given their consent — including the parents or guardians of any minors 18 and under.

‘Is this Santa Claus?’

The Santa Tracker program began in 1955 because of a mistake in a Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph newspaper advertisement from Sears, Roebuck & Co. The Sears ad misprinted the telephone number for children to call Santa. The phone number published was actually for the commander in chief’s operations hotline at the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD), the predecessor to NORAD.

Col. Harry Shoup manned the secret phone in Colorado. His daughter, Terri Van Keuren, told NPR in a 2014 interview that her father had two telephones on his desk — a regular one, and a red one that only Shoup “and a four-star general at the Pentagon” had access to. At the height of the Cold War, with tensions high and the threat of nuclear war a possibility, a call from the red phone was a heart-stopping experience.

Pam Farrell, Shoup’s other daughter, told the news outlet that the red phone rang in December 1955.

“And then there was a small voice that just asked, ‘Is this Santa Claus?’”

Shoup’s children recalled that their father, a straight-laced and disciplined military man, was annoyed by the call and believed it was a joke — until the child began crying.

“And Dad realized that it wasn’t a joke,” Farrell told NPR. “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.”

“Instead of just you know doing the whole, ‘I think you got a wrong number,’ they employed the use of all their means and figured out where Santa was and started talking to these kids,” Maj. Gen. Constance Jenkins told KKTV.

The telephone number advertised was off by a single number. Instead of calling the North Pole, children were calling the command center of CONAD.

On Christmas Eve 1955, the airmen added Santa’s sleigh to the glass board in the command center used to track flights over the United States.

“When Dad walked in, there was a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole,” Stroup’s son, Rick Stroup, told NPR.

“Dad said, ‘What is that?’ They say, ‘Colonel, we’re sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?’” Van Keuren said. “Dad looked at it for a while, and next thing you know, Dad had called the radio station and had said, ‘This is the commander at the Combat Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks like a sleigh.’ Well, the radio stations would call him like every hour and say, ‘Where’s Santa now?’”

A holiday tradition

Col. Harry Shoup died on March 29, 2009, in Colorado Springs. He was 91 and was buried at Fort Logan National Cemetery in Denver.

The tradition he started has endured. NORAD took over responsibility for tracking Santa in 1958.

If children want to talk to one of Santa’s elves, they can call 1-877-HI-NORAD.

“We open the phone lines, they start ringing, and the phones don’t stop until we close the trunk at midnight,” Canadian Army Maj. Andrew Hennessy of the NORAD Tracks Santa mission said. “It’s nonstop. You take the first call, hang up, the phone will ring again.”

Most of the volunteers tell the children to get to bed because Santa will be coming soon, Hennessey said.

“They’d say, ‘Hey, listen, Santa is going to be at your house in the next hour, so you need to go to bed or else Santa’s not going to come to your house,’” he said. “I’ve literally heard the phone drop on the floor and parents pick up and be like, ‘Can I call you again tomorrow? He’s never gone to bed that quickly in his life.’”

For years, Shoup received letters expressing gratitude.

“Later in life, he got letters from all over the world, people saying, ‘Thank you, Colonel,’ for having, you know, this sense of humor,” Van Keuren told NPR. “And in his 90s, he would carry those letters around with him in a briefcase that had a lock on it like it was top-secret information.

“You know, he was an important guy, but this is the thing he’s known for.”

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