I know it’s the day after Christmas, but I loved these Christmas stories.
Hat tip-Balloon Juice
NORAD’s Santa Tracker Began With A Typo And A Good Sport
December 19, 20144:02 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
This Christmas Eve people all over the world will log on to the official Santa Tracker to follow his progress through U.S. military radar. This all started in 1955, with a misprint in a Colorado Springs newspaper and a call to Col. Harry Shoup’s secret hotline at the Continental Air Defense Command, now known as NORAD.
Shoup’s children, Terri Van Keuren, 65, Rick Shoup, 59, and Pam Farrell, 70, recently visited StoryCorps to talk about how the tradition began.
Terri remembers her dad had two phones on his desk, including a red one. “Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the number,” she says.
“This was the ’50s, this was the Cold War, and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on the United States,” Rick says.
The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. “And then there was a small voice that just asked, ‘Is this Santa Claus?’ ”
His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.
“And Dad realized that it wasn’t a joke,” her sister says. “So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho’d and asked if he had been a good boy and, ‘May I talk to your mother?’ And the mother got on and said, ‘You haven’t seen the paper yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ Dad looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus.”
“It got to be a big joke at the command center. You know, ‘The old man’s really flipped his lid this time. We’re answering Santa calls,’ ” Terri says.“The airmen had this big glass board with the United States on it and Canada, and when airplanes would come in they would track them,” Pam says.
“And Christmas Eve of 1955, when Dad walked in, there was a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole,” Rick says.
“Dad said, ‘What is that?’ They say, ‘Colonel, we’re sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?’ Dad looked at it for a while, and next thing you know, Dad had called the radio station and had said, ‘This is the commander at the Combat Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks like a sleigh.’ Well, the radio stations would call him like every hour and say, ‘Where’s Santa now?’ ” Terri says.
“And later in life he got letters from all over the world, people saying, ‘Thank you, Colonel,’ for having, you know, this sense of humor. And in his 90s, he would carry those letters around with him in a briefcase that had a lock on it like it was top-secret information,” she says. “You know, he was an important guy, but this is the thing he’s known for.”
“Yeah,” Rick says, “it’s probably the thing he was proudest of, too.”
Santa is a black man, and he lives in New Orleans
(via @hbo) pic.twitter.com/5dnyauqeEf
— VICE News (@VICENews) December 22, 2017
From Lamh, a NOLA native:
This man has been Santa for GENERATIONs of kids and there parents here in NOLA. Watching Miracle on 34th St the other day and saw the scene where the little Dutch girl was brought to meet Santa but her adoptive mother didn’t think Santa would be able to understand her…when Santa began speaking Dutch to the young girl, she smiled wide and held a nice conversation with Santa…to folks being idiots about this…don’t you think the little Black kids seeing the Black faceif Santa don’t feel the same as the little Dutch girl from the movie? Representation matters!
Video: “Kwanzaa Celebration Morgan State University 2017.”
https://youtu.be/7W4K7zthYKM&rel=0
“Annual Founder’s Kwanzaa Message–2017 ‘Practicing the Principles of Kwanzaa: Repair, Renewing and Remaking Our World”
http://www.officialkwanzaawebsite.org/documents/AnnualFoundersKwanzaaMessagePart1–DrMaulanaKarenga2017.pdf
http://harlemcommunitynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/MIGDALE1270086.jpg
by Dr. Maulana Karenga
Excerpt:
Happy Kwanzaa!
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/03/f3/5d/03f35d6acbfdba12ac67b5833f762cc3.jpg
https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/945705281018740736
Applause!
https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/945352718050320386
https://twitter.com/TheRoot/status/945678774858928130
https://twitter.com/theGrio/status/945354429125021696
https://twitter.com/WVFDW/status/945674332088487936
https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/945663095648727040
To HELL with British officials! & FUCK #45. Harry can invite who he wants.
https://twitter.com/NMAAHC/status/945670284253847552
Thank you all so much for this and for all that you post and share and create all year long. You make the world better, you bring strength and humor and knowledge and joy. Hope all you do blesses you right back all through 2018.
Awe Thank you so much, Nancie. There would be no 3Chicspolitico without our wonderful viewers. Thank you for the blessings. We need them.
To HELL with British officials! & FUCK #45. Harry can invite who he wants.
Thank you, Nancie. Hsppy Holidays!⛄️⛄️🌲🌲💛
https://twitter.com/es_snipes/status/945663769711206400
https://twitter.com/davidsirota/status/945363724411355136
https://twitter.com/es_snipes/status/945656817903919106
https://twitter.com/es_snipes/status/945657193545830400
WTF? And the police are in charge of Ms. Garner’s visitors because? Are they afraid one of their own or one of their supporters will try to harm her?
Police killed her daddy on camera, got away with it and now at the hospital kicking people out of her room. WTF is this ISH?
Happy Kwanzaa
https://twitter.com/TheRoot/status/945338389842317312
The temp here is 0.
I just didn’t feel like putting on my Eskimo coat – it’s so heavy, so I just doubled up the scarves and hats.
Jesus Christ! Stay warm.
LOL it’s -4 in the Mini-Apple☃☃☃☃☃
Good morning, Everyone 😄😄😄
Good morning, everyone!
Good Morning, Rikyrah.
Thanks for posting the two super stories!