In its 50 years in operation, NORAD never saw a mission it didn’t like. Perhaps its most bizarre (and since the Cold War, most high profile) annual ritual of the air defense command is the “tracking” of Santa Claus across the planet. The process has come a long way from when I was a child and you’d see a brief clip of where Santa was on the 6-o-clock news, providing real-time tracking of the pop-culture icon.
And while NORAD assures us that “almost no taxpayer dollars” are spent on this mission, the question of how on earth this became their job remains. They try to explain it on the site, saying Sears once screwed up a phone number in a local advert and the guy on duty played along. But over half a century later, a joke became a formal mission in its own right… complete with corporate sponsors.
Bizarre however is to look at where Santa is declared to have stopped and where he has omitted from his global trek. Santa skipped Taiwan altogether, but found time to visit the sparsely populated Japanese island of Chichi-Jima (best known for reports it hosted US nuclear weapons during the Cold War). Kashmir missed out, as did Southern Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas (perhaps NORAD felt there was enough air traffic looming over South Waziristan for Santa to stop off in Wana?). Somehow, he felt the need to stop in Diego Garcia however, the depopulated island used by the United States for extralegal War on Terror interrogations. Santa also stopped off at Guantanamo Bay, perhaps he is a human rights investigator now?
Qom, Iran was briefly listed this afternoon, but was hastily changed to read “International Space Station.” No other Iran cities were listed. Santa stopped in Gori, Georgia as well, but conspicuously ignored Israel (no doubt the Office of Antiboycott Compliance is salivating at the legal ramifications of this omission).
Santa has just arrived in the continental United States… which will no doubt be well represented in his visits. But for children around the world (particularly in nations with heavily Christian populations like Serbia) the question must be asked: how does NORAD decide which nations Santa is to visit in a given year, and which he omits.