Sometimes a simple typo can lead to a Christmas miracle.
On a day 60 years ago, a local Sears (NASDAQ: SHLD) store in Colorado Springs ran a dial Santa ad. Except the number was a misprint. Instead of listing the number for Sears' Santa hotline, it posted the number for the Continental Air Defense Command centre.
On Christmas Eve, 1955, Colonel Harry Shoup began receiving calls from kids asking to speak with Santa Claus. Shoup worked at the operations department for the air defense centre, now known as NORAD, so the call must have come as a bit of a surprise.
Instead of telling the kids that they dialed the wrong number, Shoup said that he wasn't Santa Claus but he could track him on radar. All night, Shoup and his team fielded calls, giving kids details about Santa's location as he and his reindeer flew through the sky to deliver gifts to children.
A tradition was born, and NORAD has opened up its phone lines for its annual Santa Tracker ever since. Last year, hundreds of volunteers, including many NORAD employees and U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama, fielded 135,000 calls from 234 countries... or 40 calls per volunteer per hour.
NORAD now also operates a website and social media feeds where kids can track Santa. It partnered this year with Microsoft to develop a special Christmas coloring book for people using Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) Edge browser.
The defense centre informs kids that it uses all of its vast technology to track Santa's movements around the globe.
For the record, the current Sears Holding Corporation saw its shares slide 35 cents, or 1.7%, to $20.65 U.S., within a 52-week trading range of $18.03 U.S. to $46.23 U.S.
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