NORAD Santa Tracker Live! Lets Central Texas Children Plot Journey, Arrival Of Jolly Old Elf

AUSTIN, TX — Tonight, Santa will be making his storied rounds delivering gifts to children worldwide who have been good.

This journey has been made for many years now, but prior to 50 years ago technology wasn't available to track his travels to achieve an estimate of his arrival. Enter the North American Aerospace Defense Command(NORAD), which has tracked the journey of the jolly old elf with state-of-the-art surveillance technology for the past half-century.

That technology continues to improve each year, able to pinpoint the time Santa will descend on the Austin region as well.

The tracking tradition on the official Santa Tracker follows Santa's progress through the use of U.S. military radar. It started in 1955, with, of all things, a misprint. A Sears ad instructed children to call Santa on what turned out to be a secret military hotline, as NPR's StoryCorps explains.

But instead, the retailer mistakenly published the number to a hotline manned by Col. Harry Shoup who worked at the Continental Air Defense Command, now called NORAD. His red phone rang that December in 1955, and he heard on the other end the voice of a child with an anxious question.

"Is this Santa Claus?" the child asked haltingly.

The hardened colonel wasn't pleased, his children recently told StoryCorps, expressing his frustration as the child waited for an answer. Then the little kid started to cry, and Shoup realized this was no prank call.

"And Dad realized that it wasn't a joke," Shoup's daughter 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."

And so a tradition was born. Today, kids can call 1-877 HI-NORAD (1-877-446-6723) to talk to NORAD staff about Santa's exact location in addition to tracking them on a live stream. NORAD's come a long way since those days of a single hotline, and children availing themselves of NORAD technology can now watch it on live stream on Internet TV and broadcast their own live streaming videos, like Norad Santa Tracker Live!

So by all means, track Santa as he makes journey to your home, but don't forget to leave him milk and cookies.