24th December 2014 - It was Christmas Eve in the ....

Thought for the day: " Show me a man with both feet firmly on the ground, and I'll show you a man who can't get his trousers off!"

Today, Santa passed through the sky just after 5.25pm, and my grandchildren were able to see him passing through...   I missed it as I was checking the contents of the "Bothy" - for which you may read that I was taking a well needed nap, but due to the wonders of technology, the distant lights of the sleigh passing over was clearly visible to the naked eye.

Local papers tell me ...

To get around the world tonight Santa’s sleigh will have to travel pretty fast - though it is not clear whether even reindeer-power will reach a speed of 17,500 miles an hour. But that is how fast the International Space Station will be travelling when it makes a spectacular pass over South West Wales on Christmas Eve.

The spacecraft’s flight path means it will be very bright in the sky, and with a cloud-free forecast for this evening it should put on quite a seasonal show — for children of all ages.

Of course NORAD have been doing a lovely job for years.


NORAD's Santa Tracker is an annual Christmas tradition that began back in December 1955, when a straight-laced military man decided to be a good sport in response to a newspaper typo that prompted kids to call his top-secret hotline.

As the story goes, Sears Roebuck & Co. had placed an advertisement in a Colorado Springs newspaper telling kids to call a phone number so they could talk to Santa.

However, the number was wrong.

Instead of Santa, the five-year-old child who called the number seeking the man in the red suit got Col. Harry Shoup, the operations commander at the Continental Air Defence Command in Colorado.

The hotline was meant for calls from generals, or even the U.S. president, so the colonel was taken aback and thought somebody was playing a trick on him.

Asked by the young voice on the line if he was one of Santa's helpers, the military man finally figured it was a child calling. 

Many more calls came in to that wrong number, leading the colonel to call a local radio station and say: "We have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks like a sleigh!" Kids who called the military phone were given updates by Shoup's staff.

From that beginning, the NORAD Santa Tracker operation now fields more than 100,000 phone calls that keep 1,200 volunteers busy on Christmas Eve. The Santa Tracker website gets more than 20 million visitor.

But my Christmas Eve is surrounded by coughs and splutters, as my extended family recover from their various cold and fly symptoms. A Ninja 'Thena is lying upon a black carpet and blends into the background as people insist on putting the cookies and carrot on the floor by the fireplace - a space clearly defined as 'Thena Tummy Filler Zone...

I think a second glass of Gin and tonic is called for ...

So - A Merry Christmas to all and to all a Merry Christmas ...

May Santa bring you what you wish and not be too cheesed off by his biscuits being snaffled by a over active labrador....

Cheer