Christmas In The War Room

I could probably name Christmas Eve activities all day before hitting on what I actually ended up doing on Christmas Eve -- answering phones at NORAD. Our Christmas trip to Colorado Springs has been on the books for weeks, and I knew we were going to Peterson AFB to do something related to the annual "Santa Tracking" they do at NORAD, but what I didn't know was that I was expected to do the tracking. Well, at least to man a bank of phones and email terminals in front of the updating "radar display" tracing Santa's drunken progress across the skies. Not quite the Doctor Strangelove war-room, but I'll take it (although it would have been cooler if we'd been inside Cheyane Mountain, and even cooler if Kim Il Jong used that opportunity to go hot, and we got sealed inside the mountain to ride out World War 3 with a bunch of Air Force kids and half the animated mascots in the Western United States who were on hand to high-five everyone and pose for photos).

Maybe that wouldn't have been so cool. But it would have been a singular post-apocalypse story.

NORAD has been doing this Santa tracking thing since 1955 ... kids can call in, and (now) log onto a website to watch Santa's "progress" on the map. They can also send email -- NORAD gets hundreds of thousands of emails each season, they told me -- and mostly what I did was answer email. But I only got about twenty messages in my two-hour shift, while the phones to the left and right of me were ringing off the hook (probably eighty-plus calls each in two hours). Because of the volume of contacts, NORAD puts out a call for volunteers ... most of the folks that were there with me were Air Force or their families. I'm not sure how I wound up there except that my hosts here in Colorado Springs are plugged into the vast Military Industrial Complex, being ex-Marine and ex-Navy officers.

Anyway, it was unexpected, and actually really nice, a kind of sudden left hook that put me in the Christmas spirit whether I wanted it or not. NORAD has a FAQ that you can reference when composing your replies, but pretty soon you get down the basics ... you offer an update about where Santa is right then on the "big board" ("He's over Iran, but because of the UN Sanctions he can't land!"), then you tell the kid when Santa will be in their part of the world, which is always between 9:00 PM and Midnight local time. The FAQ has all kinds of stuff in it about the technical specs of the sleigh if someone wants to ask a real zinger, but for the most part you just wing it. The highlight questions for me were how Santa takes a piss (and if NORAD can track the emissions), and a plaintive call from a New Jersey kid visiting relatives in Italy wanting to know if Santa would bring his gifts to Italy or to Jersey.

I manfully resisted the impulse to mix in a few nasty answers ("Santa is skipping your town this year," "Santa hates you," "We just shot down that fat fuck, sorry,"), but even with my good behavior I may have inherited some bad Christmas karma for my evil thoughts. It seems like both my boys are tumbling to Santa's ficticious nature this year -- I'm holding the line with evasive answers, and pointing to the vast authority of NORAD as proof this is anything but a hoax, but in their hearts my boys know Santa is a fraud (and my seven-year-old is even more matter-of-factly convinced of this than his allegedly more savvy nine-year-old brother). At this point my best hope is to duck-and-weave on the truth until mid-year, so at least this Christmas isn't tainted by tears of betrayal ... but I expect the whole thing will come unraveled in the Spring when the implausability of the Easter Bunny becomes just too great to ignore.

(Thanks to the Christmas viewers of this post from 2006 ... if you want to checkout my current blog, please mouse over to Longbox Graveyard!)