NORAD Santa Tracker: Follow Santa Claus' journey across the world | LIVE

Every year, millions of children follows Santa Claus' travel astir the satellite with the NORAD Santa Tracker, which uses subject radar to way Santa's formation arsenic helium delivers gifts to each the bully small boys and girls. But not everyone knows that this fashionable Christmas contented began implicit 50 years agone with a typo successful a Colorado paper ad.

In 1955, Sears Roebuck & Co. ran an advertisement successful a Colorado Springs-area paper with a telephone fig that children could telephone to talk with Santa. But alternatively than being a nonstop enactment to the North Pole, the misprinted fig alternatively connected to a telephone connected the table of the Continental Air Defense Command's manager of operations, Col. Harry Shoup.

Terri Van Keuren, 1 of Shoup's daughters, recalls that reddish telephone being an important one.

"Only a four-star wide astatine the Pentagon and my dada had the number," Van Keuren told StoryCorps erstwhile she and her siblings visited precocious to stock the communicative of however the Santa tracking programme began.

So erstwhile the telephone rang 1 time that December, Col. Shoup was amazed erstwhile a tiny dependable connected the different enactment asked for Santa. Although initially annoyed by the call, Shoup played along, his children told StoryCorps. When the calls continued, Shoup began staffing the enactment with airmen to reply for Santa. On Christmas Eve, the airmen added Santa's sleigh to the solid committee successful the bid halfway utilized to way flights implicit the United States.

"Next happening you know, Dad had called the vigor presumption and had said, 'This is the commandant astatine the Combat Alert Center, and we person an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks similar a sleigh. 'Well, the vigor stations would telephone him similar each hr and say, 'Where's Santa now?'" Van Keuren said.

And truthful a contented was born.

Shoup's children accidental helium received letters from each implicit the satellite thanking him for having a consciousness of wit and starting a contented loved by truthful many.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) took implicit work for tracking Santa successful 1958. To this day, NORAD unit members, arsenic good arsenic household and friends, unpaid their clip to assistance respond to children's calls, missive and emails and way Santa's formation each Christmas.