Santa’s on his way! Keep track of where he is with NORAD

NORAD has helped generations of children track the progress of Santa from the North Pole to North America, being careful to be in bed before he reaches their rooftop.

So how exactly is NORAD able to track Santa?

Santa’s journey around the world is well underway. You can blast a streaming Good King Wenceslas while exploring Santa’s village, which includes information about NORAD, Santa Claus, holiday traditions, related YouTube videos, holiday stories and coloring pages.

The tracker opened at 2 a.m. MST today, December 24.

Sixty years ago, a local Sears store in Colorado Springs, Colo., ran a dial Santa ad. Except the number was a misprint.

The defense center tells kids that it uses all of its vast technology to track Santa’s movements around the globe.

The military’s North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, at Peterson Air Force Base, launched its 60th year of tracking Santa’s Yuletide adventure.

Children who called were given location updates and a tradition was born.

NORAD’s “Santa Cams” will stream videos over various locations, with phone operators available to answer questions about Santa’s whereabouts.

“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”. Each volunteer handles about forty telephone calls per hour, and the team typically handles more than 12,000 e-mails and more than 70,000 telephone calls from more than two hundred countries and territories.

NORAD was created in 1958 by the governments of Canada and the United States as a bi-national air defense command.