Santa Settles in for Christmas Parties

Santa has taken a good, long nap – as have many others – and now there will be a round of post-Christmas parties to attend.

One of the last of those parties this week will be a North Pole Flight Command.

Once Santa and Mrs. Claus arrived at the North Pole, and the last of the returning sleighs from Operation Airlift came back, North Pole Flight Command shut down the sleigh port. All sleighs have been grounded now and there is no one coming or going at the North Pole. For the first time since last Christmas, there are absolutely no sleighs in the skies.

The crews at Flight Command were then free to return home to their families and were given several days off. It is well deserved.

Between now and the day after New Year’s things are going to be shut down at the North Pole. Santa has called this our week of Celebrating Christmas.

But before the books are closed on Operation Merry Christmas 2022 and before we start to focus on next Christmas there will be some last minute things handled. For those of us here it will be the naming of Elf of the Year.

That will likely be announced on December 31st. It is a job that Santa wants to handle personally.

We look forward to next Christmas. But I do think it is important to celebrate what was accomplished this year. Moving forward is always important. But with Christmas we always honor the past in all that we do.

This was a formative year for SantaTrackers.net and the entire Tracker Elf project. Lessons were learned. Of course we can look forward to some changes.

But before we do all that we need to celebrate where we have come from. We need to value and savor, just a little bit, what was accomplished.

We’re doing that this week and we hope you are too.

So Merry Christmas!

And here’s to the future.

About this Elf: Elf Roger Star

Roger is an experienced sleigh pilot, designer and flight engineer who has worked the past 42 years as a flight supervisor in the Tracking Department at the North Pole. Previous to that Roger served as a designer in the Research and Development Department during the crucial years of 1947-1974, an era known for breakout designs in Santa’s sleigh that broke long standing speed records. Roger was the lead designer of Santa’s 1968 sleigh, famous for surviving a brutal blizzard in Bavaria. Elf Roger led the tracker elf as International Director of Santa Trackers from its inception as a pilot program in 2016 until 2023. He is now director of North Pole Flight Command.