PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE
— Some kids who call NORAD on Christmas Eve to find out where Santa is hang up as soon as a volunteer answers the phone — probably because they expected a recording and not a real person, veteran Santa trackers say.
There were some especially awed kids Friday, when one of the people answering the phone was first lady Michelle Obama.
A telephone link from Hawaii, where the Obamas are on vacation, allowed her to pitch in with volunteers at Peterson Air Force Base, at Colorado Springs, who were answering phone calls and e-mails for the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s Santa-tracking program.
“I was ecstatic because I was talking to the president’s wife,” said Evan Race, 10, of Springfield, Ill. He and his family were in North Carolina for the holidays when they decided to call NORAD.
“I was really surprised,” said his 8-year- old sister, Anna. Seven-year-old Colin Race also got to talk with Michelle Obama.
The White House said she took calls for 40 minutes and spoke with children from at least a dozen families.
It’s believed to be the first time in the 55-year history of the event that a first lady joined in, said Jamie Graybeal, NORAD’S deputy chief of staff for communications.
NORAD Tracks Santa, the official name of the program, began in 1955 when a Colorado Springs newspaper ad invited kids to talk to Santa on a hotline. The phone number had a typo, and dozens of kids wound up dialing the Continental Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado Springs, the predecessor to NORAD.
The officers on duty played along and began passing along reports on Santa’s progress. It’s now a cherished ritual at NORAD, a joint U.S.-Canada command that monitors the North American skies and seas from a control center at Peterson.
“It’s really ingrained in the NORAD psyche and culture,” said Canadian Forces Lt. Gen. Marcel Duval, the deputy commander of NORAD, who pitches in to field French-language calls on Christmas Eve. “It’s a goodwill gesture from all of us, on our time off, to all the kids on the planet.”
Duval is careful to say that tracking Santa doesn’t interfere with the work of watching out for enemy threats to North America.
Although the program is aimed at children, the volunteers answering the phones have a welcome bit of news for parents, too: St. Nick won’t stop at homes unless all the kids are asleep.
Volunteer Liz Anderson said that when she tells kids that, she will sometimes hear parents say, “See! I told you.”
All the labor is volunteer. Google, Verizon, Air Canada, defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton and others chip in.
NORAD insiders drop hints about how they track Santa — “ultra-cool, high-tech, high-speed digital cameras,” radar, satellites and Canadian Forces fighter jets. But any inquiry into the technological particulars is met with a polite rebuff and a cryptic explanation involving the magic of Christmas.
55th Year NORAD has tracked Santa
4 months Of planning
1,200 Volunteers
100 Phones
30 Laptops
2 Big projection TVs
74,000 Calls answered last year
3,500 E-mails from around the world last year
13 million Visits to the website last year
600,000 “Likes” on Facebook by Friday
47,000 Followers on Twitter by Friday
