It began 70 years ago when a five-year-old called a top-secret emergency line reserved for the U.S. president and four-star generals and asked, “Hello, is this Santa?”
It was December 1955 — the height of the Cold War. The phone that rang was big and red, only to be used during an international emergency.
That wrong number — and many others that followed because of a simple typo in a newspaper ad — ended up launching a mission like none other for the North American Aerospace Defense Command, NORAD: to develop a tracking system allowing families to follow Santa’s journey around the world.
Since then, the Santa Tracker has become a source of joy for millions of children.
Yes I want to keep my culture, that’s exactly my point. I don’t want bad translations pushing the US version. Bad enough that basically all the Christmas entertainment media we get is US centric. It would be so easy to include a sentence about local traditions in this translation but nobody put the effort in and I am left to wonder why the translation even exists in the first place.
You don’t understand… If the slop is inoffensive, it’ll pour in everywhere. Your culture will drown in it, one day you will wake up and realize ads have decided how you should properly interact with your family
It’s good that you don’t like it. That means you have something to protect, you still have something you value
Do you understand how much Americans hunger for culture? It’s not because we don’t have it, we have hundreds of cultures. It’s because it has all been mixed together into inoffensive slurry that leaves us feeling empty
The important and unimportant are all mixed up and drained away, and it’s not the important things that remain. It’s the things that profit someone