WASHINGTON, Dec. 24 (UPI) -- As children around the world eagerly await the arrival of Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, The North American Aerospace Defense Command is dutifully tracking Santa's movements around the world.
The big guy started his gift giving in Russia, cutting down through southeast Asia, then north toward the Koreas to kick off the holiday season.
Santa just tracked over Pyongyang, North Korea. Though its leaders may be naughty, the children are still nice. @NoradSanta
— NORAD & USNORTHCOM (@NoradNorthcom) December 24, 2014
The tradition began in 1955 after a Colorado Springs Sears ran a promotion encouraging kids to call their "Santa hotline" to talk to St. Nick. But an ad run in local papers misprinted the hotline's number, and instead encouraged young baby boomers to contact Col. Harry Shoup of the Continental Air Defense Command, which would eventually become NORAD.
Unwilling to break kids hearts by revealing he was not Santa Claus, Shoup played along as the calls came in. His role as the military's unofficial Santa Claus became an office joke at the command center, and that Christmas Eve Shoup arrived to work to find a sleigh and eight reindeer placed on CONAD's air traffic map.
"Dad said, 'What is that?" described Shoup's son Rick to NPR.
"They say, 'Colonel, we're sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?' 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?'"