As midnight approaches on Dec. 25, Santa Claus visits one time zone after another. This is visible on the Santa tracker run by NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
Starting early in the day on Christmas Eve, the tracker shows Santa Claus zig-zagging to cover the world with gifts in 24 hours. The path travels from east to west as night falls on different parts of the world throughout Dec. 24.
The tracker is nearing its 70th anniversary, and the whole tradition started because of a misdialed phone number.
In 1955, a Colorado Springs newspaper ran a Sears store advertisement that included a phone number for Santa Claus.
A common legend said the advertisement misprinted the phone number. Those calls went to a facility for NORAD’s predecessor, the Continental Air Defense Command, or CONAD, also in Colorado Springs.
However, a newspaper clip from the time, unearthed in 2014 by tech blog Gizmodo, reported that a kid misdialed the phone number by flipping two digits, reaching a very annoyed crew commander.