I Hear Those Sleigh Bells Jingling

Ring-ting-ting-a-ling, too.Here’s a fun bit of holiday trivia:

[M]ore than half a century ago, on Christmas Eve in 1955, . . . a Sears Roebuck & Co. store in Colorado Springs advertised a special hotline number for kids to call Santa. What the company didn’t know at the time was that they had inadvertently misprinted the telephone number. Instead of Santa’s workshop, the phone number put kids through to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the bi-national U.S.-Canadian military organization responsible for the aerospace defense of the U. S. and Canada.

Thankfully, the children on the telephone were not declared alien unlawful enemy combatants and shipped off to Gitmo or rendered to some foreign land for waterboarding until they admitted that they were terrorists and “Santa” was code for “Launch the attack!” or “All your base are belong to us!” Instead, the nice people at NORAD shared their tracking data with the children to let them know just whose airspace Santa Claus and his eight tiny reindeer were invading at any given moment.

Again, thankfully, none of those children used this information to launch surface-to-air missiles or fire anti-aircraft rounds at Jolly Old Saint Nick, so the presents will keep on coming, so long as the North Pole manages to avoid any economic downturn that might affect elf productivity. Maybe the Department of Labor should start up its own tracking system to keep us informed as to any labor negotiations between Santa and his elves. Wouldn’t it be terribly jolly and informative if you could tell children on Christmas morning that there will be no presents this year because Santa Clause, unlike even Ebenezer Scrooge, was unable to come to an agreement with his employees regarding compensation?

“Sorry, kids. No collective bargaining agreement this year. You’ll just have to be satisfied with God blessing us, every one.”

“But why, daddy?”

“Well, you see, with global warming and all, and the polar ice caps melting, the elves are looking at some pretty steep increases to their cost of living. Meanwhile, Santa has to worry about bringing his operation into compliance with stricter air quality control standards, so he’s feeling the pinch, too, and can’t afford to pay the elves a living wage. As it turns out, some of the elves working for Santa can’t afford to feed their children and have actually left Santa’s Workshop and started their own business at the North Pole—a technical support call center. So there’s not enough elves left to make presents for everyone and you don’t get anything this year.”

“How do you know all that, daddy?”

“Oh, this handy-dandy Department of Labor website kept me updated!”

Yeah, that’s the stuff.

Anyway, check out the NORAD Santa-tracking website. It’s pretty sweet. If you go to the cinderblock building on the outskirts of the west side of Santa’s village, the one called “Merry Music Makers,” you can play Jingle Bells on handbells.