In 1948, as the Cold War replaced the Second World War, it was the State Department that dispatched a diplomatic cable to Kris Kringle, communicating “united desire for peace on earth,” and authorizing him to communicate this “to all men, using herald angels if supplemental personnel imperative.” Perhaps that seemed too utopian a wish, at the height of the Berlin Airlift. The cable took pains to specify: “Danger vetoes, blockades, transportation-delays appears remote.” One day a year, it was nice to imagine a world in which that were actually true.

The Air Force, newly independent of the Army, was quick to get in on the act. It released its first seasonal communiqué in 1948, reporting that its “early warning radar net to the north” had detected “one unidentified sleigh, powered by eight reindeer, at 14,000 feet, heading 180 degrees.” The Associated Press duly passed it along.

By the 1950s, the nation stood on edge, worried that with little notice, the entire country might be incinerated in a nuclear attack. CONAD’s director of combat operations, Colonel Harry W. Shoup, had a flair for public relations. He won a citation for quelling noise complaints from communities adjacent to a base he commanded by explaining “that the noise from friendly jets isn’t as bad as bombs from enemy jets could be.” In October of 1955, he told reporters that Russian jets were capable of reaching any point in the continental United States in 9 to 12 hours. His point, presumably, was to stress the vital importance of CONAD’s role, standing vigilant against Soviet bombers crossing over the North Pole en route to the United States.

It was Shoup who manned the consoles in the fall of 1955. And on November 30, he was sitting at his desk when an ordinary phone rang. (It wasn’t a Red Phone, which ran through a dedicated, lead-encased cable. The whole point of a direct connection between CONAD to SAC was to ensure that the line would remain open, operational, and entirely secure; it wasn’t connected to a public exchange.)

A newspaper account unearthed by Gizmodo’s Matt Novak tells earliest known version of the story. A child trying to dial Santa on the Sears hotline instead dialed an unlisted phone at CONAD, “by reversing two digits.” Colonel Shoup “answered much more roughly than he should—considering the season: ‘There may be a guy named Santa Claus at the North Pole, but he’s not the one I worry about coming from that direction.’”

Bah, humbug!

There was no flood of calls that first year, because to reach CONAD, two particular digits had to be reversed. A few weeks later, when Shoup’s staff drew a flying Santa on the board for tracking unidentified aircraft, he spotted an opportunity. He had his public-relations officer, Colonel Barney Oldfield, tell the wire services that CONAD was tracking Santa, touting its cutting-edge capabilities, but with a rather martial take on the Christmas spirit:

CONAD, Army, Navy and Marine Air Forces will continue to track and guard Santa and his sleigh on his trip to and from the U.S. against possible attack from those who do not believe in Christmas.

The press ate it up. The next fall, as CONAD sought to boost its profile, Oldfield asked Shoup to repeat his Santa-tracking stunt. Shoup reportedly demurred, until Oldfield told him that the AP and UPI had already called. That was enough to tip the balance.