Article - NORAD begins Mission Santa

Remember the old warning that Santa Claus is watching you? Well, fair is fair.
   You can keep an eye on Santa, thanks to 26 “Santa cams” stationed worldwide.
   North American Aerospace Defense Command’s Santatracking Web site is slated to power up today at www.norad santa.org.
   The interactive site pinpoints Santa’s travels, cookie capers and colorful history.
   Last year the site got 577 million hits, 60,000 e-mails and 49,229 phone calls.
   “It is our 50th season of tracking Santa,” said Canadian Army Maj. Douglas Martin, chief of Santa Tracking at NORAD.
   “It started back in 1955 when a Col. Harry Shoup got the first call at the operations center by accident. Sears-Roebuck put an ad in The Gazette that said something like, ‘Hey kiddies, do you want to talk to Santa? Dial this number.’ The number was off by one number.”
   It rang into the defense command’s operations center.
   “Instead of saying ‘wrong number,’ Shoup said, ‘I’ll check the radars.’ ”
   Kids have been calling on Christmas Eve ever since to get Santa’s estimated time of arrival.
   Santa’s adherence to time zones helps make NORAD’s job easier in tracking his philanthropic junket across the planet. “He leaves the North Pole around 3 a.m. Mountain Time. He makes a beeline to the International Dateline in the South Pacific,” Martin said. “He crosses each time zone at approximately 11 p.m. He backtracks when there are kids still awake.”
   Santa’s ETA in Colorado Springs this year?
   If air traffic is clear over Interstate 25, he should whisk in from Denver around 10:57 p.m.
   Better call on Christmas Eve, just to be safe.
   “We open the lines at 7 a.m. and don’t close until about midnight,” he said. “The phone number is answered by more than 400 volunteers throughout the day.”
   It’s not a Santa tell-all.
   “We don’t know what he is bringing. We don’t know his secrets. We know where he is,” Martin said.
   This year’s celebrity Santa tracker is Clifford the Big Red Dog, the first canine to sniff out Santa’s trail.
   “He picked us,” Martin said. “He is the right color.”
   Last year’s honorary tracker, former Beatle Ringo Starr, will trade his drumsticks for a camera to capture the jolly old elf as he leaves France and goes over the English Channel.
   Other Santa cams are in New Zealand, Japan, India, the Persian Gulf and Brazil as well as on planes and, of course, atop Cheyenne Mountain.
   “Kids can watch it unfold as Santa goes around the world. A lot of parents and grandparents pull out atlases and talk about different places,” Martin said.
   The site also is in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese, thanks to a dozen local volunteer translators.
   Fadia Gnoske, owner of Globelink Languages and Cultural Services in downtown Colorado Springs, added five languages to the site in 1998 when she discovered it was in English only.
   Gnoske and staff members Kobi Chumash and Zahira Saed start work on the project in August and continue throughout the season, providing “live” Christmas Eve reports and answering e-mails.
   It’s an international effort: Gnoske is Egyptian, Chumash is from Israel, and Saed is Palestinian.
   “It is an extension of what we like to do, which is reach out to people all over the world and get them to connect,” Gnoske said.
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   abrown@gazette.com