Finally, some very fun news from the Trib. Holiday goings on at NORAD:

Maj. Doug Martin of the Canadian army is managing one of NORAD's highest profile annual activities: tracking the progress of Santa and his reindeer-driven sleigh across the heavens on Christmas Eve.



This has grown into a big job, indeed. Last year, NORAD's Santa-tracking Web site received 289 million hits. No other site in the world details where Santa is to be found Christmas Eve in full living color and in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Japanese.



More than 200 volunteers fielded 7,000 phone calls last Christmas and responded to 27,000 e-mails. This year, the number of volunteers has swelled to 375, all military personnel and their families, who will spend almost 24 full hours answering questions such as "How does he get down all those chimneys?" and "How fast does he fly, anyway?"



"We'd love to know the answer--we know it's at least Mach 30, or 30 times the speed of sound--but many details of Santa's flights are classified," Martin said.



....



All this began as an accident 47 years ago, when a local Sears store published a wrong number in a newspaper ad inviting kids to call Santa. The number in the paper was actually a hotline at NORAD. When a colonel picked up the phone expecting a general on the other end in December 1955, a 6-year-old boy asked to talk to Santa instead.



Yes, our radar does show something. Yes, it's Santa, the quick-thinking colonel told the boy, and you'd better go to bed before he comes. More calls came in, and a NORAD tradition was born.



...



"When you think about it, tracking and protecting Santa is mission accomplished for NORAD, because what we're really about is preserving the peace every day of the year, but particularly on Christmas," Venable said. To which Americans may well want to say, amen.

Indeed. For those who celebrate Christmas, Merry Christmas.

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