It started on Christmas Eve in 1955, when an eager child picked up the phone to call Santa Claus and instead accidentally called a U.S. military air defense facility.
That facility is operated by Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD), the precursor to today's North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), and should have only been reachable by a select few high-ranking officers and the President of the United States. But on Christmas Eve 1955, confused airmen usually tasked with tracking aircraft from foreign airspace ended up impersonating Santa Claus thanks to that child who dialed a wrong number. The accident quickly became a tradition and, like many other traditions, its origin story began to grow ever more elaborate over the years, sometimes involving a misprinted phone number in an advertisement.
