NORAD's Santa tracker draws criticism with fighter jet escort
Source: Fox News
A North American Aerospace Defense Command website showing Santa Claus delivering presents while flanked by fighter jets has some child advocates raising concerns about Saint Nick's new travel companions.
NORAD Tracks Santa, operated by the joint U.S.-Canada command, has provided children with information about Santa's whereabouts since 1955. In recent years, Santa updates have included animated videos showing Santa on his flight path.
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Allen Kanner, a California child and family psychologist and co-founder of the Boston-based Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, told The Boston Globe the Pentagon is "completely out of line" for linking Christmas with the military.
“Children associate Santa with gifts and fun and everything else that is positive about Christmas,” Kanner told the newspaper. “They are associating this with the military in children’s minds."
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Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/12/04/norad-santa-tracking-draws-criticism-with-fighter-jet-escort/
This is wrong on so many levels.
Obama should order NORAD to stand down.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Every Christmas I'm reminded how valiant the North American Aerospace Defense Command was during the greatest attack to the American mainland ever.
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People are trying their damndest to FORGET about USA's wars -
at least for a little bit . . .
OK GUYS???
sheesh
CC
1955, the Sears store in Colorado Springs put in the local paper an ad for young people to call Santa. The problem was the number printed was NOT the Sears Santa line but the TOP SECRET Line to Norad. Norad was prepared for a long boring Christmas Eve and the phones started to ring off the walls. Call after call after call. Here you had battle harded pilots trained to take phone calls about having order a Nuclear Attack on Russia, having three to five year old calling in. You can;t tell them it is the wrong number, they to young to understand. Thus this became a MAJOR Crisis for Norad, some people call the worse Crisis Norad ever faced (Even during the Cuban Missile Crisis Norad did not get as many calls). A new phone number was arranged through Bell Telephone for outgoing calls (and for incoming calls, once people who were authorized to call were told of the new number). while every one was called to answer the phones in case it was someone who was calling in a nuke strike. All the calls had to be answered for you did not know which one would be one calling for a nuke strike (no nuke strike was called in, Even Russia took a Christmas Holiday that year).
The decision was made since the it was NORAD (Technically it was CONRAD, the name was changed to NORAD a few years later) for the callers to give the callers any coordinates for Santa that year and most children were happily knowing Santa was on his way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORAD_Tracks_Santa
Now, good numbers are hard to NOT to keep for years, so NORAD had to prepare for such calls the new year, and it has been a December tradition ever since. No actual US funds are used, the money for the service is provided by the volunteers.
According to Gerry Bowler, a history professor at the University of Manitoba, the NORAD Tracks Santa program is "one of the few modern additions to the centuries-old Santa Claus story that have stuck." Bowler stated that the program "takes an essential element of the Santa Claus story — his travels on Christmas Eve — and looks at it through a technological lens," therefore bringing the Santa Claus mythology into the modern era
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORAD_Tracks_Santa
http://www.noradsanta.org/