Shooting Down Santa

I use the NORAD Santa tracker as an excuse to talk through the history of air defense:

Eventually, this resulted in enormous “gift packages” that were both expensive and unwieldy. To resolve this Santa’s elves began to work on stealth technology, which would allow a single sleigh to avoid radar coverage and thus the most potent of air defenses. Santa had long enjoyed the built-in advantage of operating exclusively at night, but special stealth coatings and radar-defying shapes helped make the sleigh nearly impossible to defend against. Rudolf, in part because of his nose so bright, lacks stealth characteristics and was retired in 1993.