Letter to Santa: What Christmas communication reveals about digital trends

Image: – © AFP ULISES RUIZ

Mailtrap has released a data-led look at how U.S. citizens tried to contact Santa and why. This follows up on a similar report from last year, with the 2025 edition seeking to understand what has changed, and how U.S. citizens are using AI for their Christmas planning.

There is a purpose to this approach and that is to highlight shifts in technology. The general trend is one away from snail mail and email towards digital developments like chat boxes, although there are variations between different states.

Certainly, there is evidence of a continuing ‘digital transformation’ of Christmas. In this context, digitalisation has changed much. The busiest shopping season requires retailers to adopt new strategies, new product families, new sales channels and, often, an entirely new ecosystem in order to interact and to attract consumers.

To highlight this, the company has created a new metric: the Santa Index Score based on specific keyword data extracted from Ahrefs and Google.

The Santa Index Score is a weighted ranking based on:

• How much they search for Santa now (40% weight on our rankings)
• How much their festive curiosity has grown year-over-year (40% weight on our rankings)
• How heavily they lean on AI or AI chatbots to speak to Santa (20% weight on our rankings, since it’s a novelty factor and not core)

The findings suggest that AI-assisted Christmas planning is skyrocketing: searches for tools like “card generator AI” are up 77%, and “AI gift idea generator” is up nearly 20% year-on-year. The idea of  a gift generator is provide ideas based on small amounts of personal details added into an engine like ChatGPT.

Overall, video conferencing and similar tools using peer-to-peer technology are also popular for families to communicate with each other.

In addition, the terms “Santa phone number” and “Santa email address” remain widely searched but grow slowly. The standout is that “Santa email” shows a big decline (-69%), suggesting users now prefer AI Santa chatbots. This information can be useful to retailers offering services that interface with children.

With specific patterns from particular states, Alabama is ahead of the U.S. norm in Christmas engagement with a Santa Index Score of 62.53, followed by Iowa, Kansas, and West Virginia.

More specific metrics show other patterns. For example, when it comes to AI related searches, Delaware leads the charts, followed by Wyoming, Hawaii, and Rhode Island.

Based on shifts from the 2024 study, Montana has the largest year-on-year change in Christmas searches per 100,000 citizens, with Alabama, Kansas, Iowa, and Wisconsin right behind. In general, the top states interested in this holiday period are Utah, Alaska and Illinois.

Not every state is showing ‘growth’ since several states showing declines in traditional Santa-related searches – like South Dakota, North Dakota, Rhode Island, and Vermont – show corresponding increases in AI-assisted holiday tools.