It's Christmas Eve and the North American Aerospace Defense Command has provided the opportunity for children to track Santa's location another year, rounding off almost 60 years of enchantment, according to Reuters.
NORAD has tracked Santa's path since 1955 when Sears ran a Christmas ad in a newspaper telling kids to call the Santa hotline, but they gave a high level airspace office number by instead, according to Reuters.
Children then began calling and Colonel Harry Shoup who was stationed in that office began to answer the call and tell the children he was indeed Santa, even taking down their Christmas lists, Reuters reported.
After hundred of calls began to pour in NORAD Santa tracker was born .
Last year the NORAD website attracted 22.3 million visitors and 114,000 children called the hotline, Reuters reported.
This year, Lieutenant Commander Bill Lewis is stationed at the NORAD center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and he said Santa is "sticking to the same flight plan as he provided us," Reuters reported.
The NORAD center has gone all out, and even explain that they keep up with Santa's fast pace with satellites and "infrared sensor to detect heat signatures from Rudolph's nose," according to Reuters.
In a change of plans, NORAD announced they would be sending animated war planes to ride with Santa's sleigh, but this gained immediate negative feedback from child advocates who said kids might be worried if they felt Santa was going to be attacked, Reuters reported.
But according to NORAD, they have been placing jets following Santa's sleigh since the 1960s and they will only be used to help Santa enter the North American airspace, after that he would be a "on his own to do his work" Lewis said, according to Reuters.
Terri Van Keuren, Colonel Shoup's daughter, said she thinks the entire NORAD operation is "marvelous" the tradition was able to grow from telephone and radio reports, then to television and now a complete interactive website, according to Reuters.
Keuren said Colonel Shoup was "tickled pink he could see the results of it before he died," adding he had become known as the "Santa colonel," according to Reuters.
