Starting this year, it will be possible to easily locate Santa in Korea through its homepage rather than through international calls. According to the Associated Press and other media, NORAD’s Santa tracking service will run from 4 a.m. on Monday through midnight on the same day. By calling the U.S. phone number 1-877-446-6723, you can make a direct call with a Santa tracking agent, who finds and informs you of his location. More than 1,000 volunteers dubbed “Santa Claus is here” receive cute phone calls from children asking where he is. Last year, about 380,000 calls were made.
Previously, people called the U.S. number and asked for Santa’s location, but this year, a function that allows users to easily listen to voice information outside of North America through the NORAD official website (noradsanta.org ) will be added. “Only Santa knows Santa’s whereabouts, so it is impossible to predict when and where he will arrive at your house,” NORAD headquarters said. According to NORAD, Santa entered Korea at 11:24 p.m. on Dec. 24 last year and delivered about 20 million presents to Korean children. It was because of an advertisement that was misprinted in the U.S. in 1955 that made NORAD launch the service. A department store in Colorado, the U.S., put up an advertisement that said it would track Santa’s location during Christmas, and the phone number in the advertisement was the number of the Colorado Springs Air Defense Command (CONAD), the predecessor of NORAD. After receiving a flurry of inquiries from children at the time, Colonel Harry Schauff informed them of Santa’s location with a lie in good faith so as not to disappoint them, which has continued to this day.
SAM KIM
US ASIA JOURNAL
