In 1955, a Colorado Springs-based Sears store ran an advertisement encouraging children to call Santa Claus on a special telephone hotline. Due to a printing error, the phone number that was printed was the hotline for the Director of Operations at the Continental Air Defense (CONAD). Colonel Harry Shoup took the first Santa call on Christmas Eve of 1955 from a six-year old boy who began reciting his Christmas list. Shoup didn’t find the call funny, but after asking the mother of the second caller what was happening, then realizing the mistake that occurred, he instructed his staff to give Santa’s position to any child who called in. Three years later, the governments of the United States and Canada combined their national domestic air defenses into the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), but the tradition continued. (Thanks for that Wikipedia

Since then, NORAD has modernized, and now instead of just calling in to find Santa’s location, you can track him live on iGoogle! This gadget uses the Google maps API to display Santa’s position in realtime. In the meantime, you can see a Santa’s smiling face counting down to the big day. With all these tools available, it’s great to see that the North Pole is still relying on good old fashioned blue-collar labor to get the presents delivered, and hasn’t outsourced delivery to a predator drone or something (jk). Merry Christmas iGoogle!!