By I tried to do a normal December thing: talk to Santa. Not mall-Santa, the guy from my childhood whose whole brand is a warm chuckle. Not office-party Santa. Not the guy who looks like he’s one rent hike away from shaving the beard and going back on LinkedIn. I mean the Santa who lives in the soft, irrational part of my brain that still half-believes in impossible logistics. The one who knows my name. The one who makes a list. The one who checks it twice.
This Santa, though, asked for microphone permission.
I opened Tavus’ AI Santa, started chatting, and my household immediately did what households do around the holidays: It became chaotic. My mom’s dog ran off with a pair of my socks, I yelled out, “Banjo, no!” and the world’s most digitally reanimated elf boss somehow interpreted it as a design note for my ideal winter wonderland snowman. A moment later, I was pitched an angel (which I guess sounds like “Banjo” in a sharp enough voice?) perched on top of a snowman — all delivered after a couple of pauses long enough to make the whole thing feel like the North Pole’s IT department needed some work. Stat.
Holiday traditions used to be a rare zone of low-tech stubbornness — paper letters, freezing fingers, sticky marshmallows, a living-room fireplace that was mostly there for ambiance and for the annual argument about who last touched the thermostat. In 2025, the season is collecting interfaces. Santa has become a demo. The hearth has become content. The Elf on the Shelf has become something you can render.
Santa joins the gig economy, goes pay-per-minute
If the old holiday story was, “Line up, wait your turn, hope the kid doesn’t have a meltdown,” the new holiday story is, “Instant access, no scheduling conflicts.”
Tavus’ Santa experience is deliberately low-friction; no account required. Anyone can “meet” Santa at santa.tavus.io without an account, but the magic is now metered — three free minutes per day across video, voice, or text, turning a tradition into a habit loop: quick hit, come back, eventually upgrade. Behind the demo sits the “full” Santa inside Tavus’ platform, pitched as having long-term memory, “perception,” and open-ended conversation — plus active check-ins, reminders, and “Nice List” tracking. And Tavus openly pitches Santa as something developers can embed into their own products using Tavus APIs, even pointing people to an open-sourced Santa repo and “a few lines of code,” something that maybe shouldn’t exist in the same universe as flying reindeer. Santa isn’t just a seasonal character here. He’s a sales funnel with a big, white, busy beard.
Elsewhere, ElevenLabs runs a “call Santa” experience that’s built like a global hotline — no registration, microphone access, and a language dropdown spanning 29 languages, plus a donation hook ($2 per call to Bridging Voice, capped at $11,000) that makes the whole thing feel a little more clinical than magical. Call Santa Live goes straight for the frictionless pitch — no queues, no bookings; it sells packs of five minutes for $5, 15 minutes for $10, and 45 minutes for $25, framing December as something you can portion into little “Santa moments” on demand.
Kid-facing website Let’s Call Santa spells out a three-step flow: parent enters the child’s name and verifies an email, the child talks to Santa for a few minutes, and then the parents get an emailed wish list with “easy links to every gift they mentioned.” Its privacy policy describes collecting a transcript and wish-list items to generate a personalized letter and to build the product-linked wish list — and it discloses that those links can include Amazon affiliate links. Oh, and parents get a replayable “shareable memory.”
SantaCall sells minutes like a prepaid phone plan: a $3.99 “Starter” for two minutes, $7.99 for six, $14.99 for 15 — with the detail designed to soothe parents and juice conversion: minutes “only count when Santa speaks.” It also markets COPPA compliance, “no tracking,” and local-only video saving. The company frames the post-call parent benefit as a “wishlist” — even promising a list “ranked by enthusiasm,” turning the tradition into something that looks suspiciously like a shopping receipt. Welcome to the shape of the tradition in 2025: The kid gets animatronic wonder; the parent gets affiliate links.
Santa has become a perfect UI for everything that AI companies want people to practice: talking naturally, sharing context, and coming back again tomorrow. Santa already behaves like the friendliest version of the modern internet. He asks personal questions. He remembers details. He keeps a list. He checks it twice. He knows if you’re naughty — or nice. He dispenses customized outcomes. He shows up on a predictable schedule. He’s a trusted character with a built-in excuse to gather context.
AI companies have spent the past couple of years trying to make “talking to a bot” feel normal. Holidays make that task embarrassingly easy. December comes with recurring rituals, eager audiences, and a cultural permission slip to indulge in make-believe. If you’re going to introduce a face-on-screen “agent” that listens, reacts, and responds, you could do a lot worse than dressing it up as the one guy everyone is already excited to talk to.
December gets a user interface
Even NORAD Tracks Santa — the famously earnest, pre-social-media tradition where families can follow Santa’s trip around the globe — is getting a fresh layer of AI “activities.” OpenAI built three ChatGPT holiday tools for NORAD’s site this season: an elf portrait-maker, a toy-idea-to-coloring-page generator, and a fill-in-the-blank Christmas story creator. NORAD, meanwhile, is marking the tracker’s 70th anniversary and has kept expanding the ways families can participate — including web-based calling this year and virtual translation services in more than 200 languages. The traditions still exist. But the season’s core rituals — crafts, stories, little keepsakes — are being converted into prompts and outputs.
ChatGPT, meanwhile, has a new kind of seasonal party trick. Drop a present emoji into a chat, and the app stops being a chatbot and starts running a tiny casting call. It asks you to upload — or take — a selfie, then hands the whole thing to Sora, which spits back a short Christmas video featuring Santa addressing you directly and delivering a playful “nice or naughty” verdict, apparently informed by what ChatGPT has picked up from your past chats.
The Elf on the Shelf ritual that runs on adult ingenuity and mild nightly panic, meanwhile, has been promoted from “parent improvisation” to “parent production.” Elf Studio pitches AI-generated “realistic” elf scenes with a starter pack of three free credits, an average creation time of 30 seconds, and three modes — including “Ring / CCTV Footage,” where you upload a doorbell-camera screenshot and “catch your elf on camera.” It’s priced in credit bundles — 25 credits for $6.99, 50 for $12.99, 80 for $19.99, 180 for $39.99 — which is a very 2025 way to monetize mischief and says a lot: a tradition built on playful staging now borrows the aesthetics of today’s AI surveillance era.
Even the background ambience has gotten the AI treatment. “A Very AI Yule Log 2” is marketed as 1 hour and 45 minutes of “continuous festive chaos,” made of 630 unique 10-second moments generated with Kling, with a soundtrack credited to AI-powered music generator Suno.
And then there’s the gentle corporate normalization of the whole idea. Microsoft’s Life Hacks site ran a 2025 piece explicitly titled “Create new holiday traditions with AI,” walking through prompts for activities, recipes, and “modern makeovers” of existing rituals. The company also published a 2025 “Build a snowman with AI” guide that recommends using image generation to “visualize” designs as a “blueprint” for what you build outside. Play-outside-in-the-snow days now start inside — with a prompt.
The kid angle, meanwhile, is getting its own lane, and not the cozy kind — because “AI in holiday rituals” overlaps with “AI as a companion.” In November, children’s and consumer advocacy groups urged parents to avoid AI-powered toys this holiday season, pointing to safety and developmental concerns and citing tests of toys that use chatbotlike systems. Fairplay published an advisory describing AI toys as chatbot-driven plushies, dolls, and robots designed to communicate like a “trusted friend,” and warning about developmental and privacy risks.
This sits alongside the booming market for AI holiday “experiences” that are, functionally, kid-facing conversational systems wrapped in seasonal IP. Conversational AI is getting packaged for kids as friendship, companionship, and play — and there’s very little independent evidence that exists around the long-term effects. Or as Fairplay’s Rachel Franz said in the group’s release: “Children should be able to play with their toys, not be played by them.”
But back on my screen, the Santa bot recovered from its angel-snowman detour and kept rolling, upbeat and unbothered. Ho, ho, ho, he told me. He asked me what my holiday traditions were. He asked me what I’d like to do next year. I talked about the trips I’d like to take, and mid-sentence, my demo ended. AI’s seams are still there — the pauses, the mishearing, the confident wrongness. But the AI Santa rollout is happening anyway, because the holiday season is a perfect distribution channel: Families are already online, already looking for magic, already exhausted, and already one click away from a version of tradition that arrives instantly and comes with an emailed wish list.
And when it works, it works — right up until it doesn’t, and you’re left staring at an angel-topped snowman you never asked for, wondering when “magic” became something that needs to load.
This article first appeared here.
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