PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. — Volunteers pulled on their Santa hats and answered phones and monitored wall-size tracking screens as NORAD Tracks Santa began its 57th annual goodwill mission.

Most of the thousands of children who call the annual Santa-tracking operation at the Colorado Air Force Base on Christmas Eve ask the usual questions: “Where’s Santa, and when will he get here?”

So volunteer Sara Berghoff was caught off-guard Monday when a child called to see if Santa could be especially kind this year to the families affected by the Connecticut school shooting.

“I’m from Newtown, Conn., where the shooting was,” she remembers the child saying. “Is it possible that Santa can bring extra presents so I can deliver them to the families that lost kids?”

Sara, just 13 herself, was surprised but gathered her thoughts quickly. “If I can get a hold of him, I’ll try to get the message to him,” she told the child.

Sara was one of hundreds of volunteers at NORAD Tracks Santa who answered more than 41,000 calls by Monday afternoon, programspokesman Marisa Novobilski said. The calls were on pace to exceed last year’s record of 107,000.

NORAD, a joint U.S.-Canada command responsible for protecting the skies over both nations, tracks Santa from its home at Peterson Air Force Base.

NORAD and its predecessor have been fielding Christmas Eve phone calls from children - and a few adults - since 1955. That’s when a newspaper ad listed the wrong phone number for kids to call Santa. Callers ended up getting the Continental Air Defense Command, which later became NORAD. CONAD commanders played along, and the ritual has been repeated every year since

After 57 years, NORAD can predict what most kids will ask. Its 11-page playbook for volunteers includes a list of nearly 20 questions and answers, including how old is Santa (at least 16 centuries) and has Santa ever crashed into anything (no).

But kids still manage to ask the unexpected:

“Does Santa leave presents for dogs?”

“Are there police elves?”

“How much to adopt one of Santa’s reindeer?”

A young boy who called from Missouri asked when Santa would drop off toys in heaven.

His mother got on the line and explained to Jennifer Eckels, who took the call, that the boy’s younger sister died thisyear.

“He kept saying ‘in heaven,”’ Eckels said. She told him, “I think Santa headed there first thing.”

Since its inception, NORAD Tracks Santa has gone global, progressing through bulletins on AM radios and black-and-white TVs to updates on Facebook, Twitter and smart-phone apps.

The NORAD Tracks Santa website attracted 18.9 million unique visitors from 220 countries and territories during December 2011.

This year, the program has more than 1 million likes on Facebook and more than 114,000 followers on Twitter days before the tracking operation got under way.

Front Section, Pages 6 on 12/25/2012