The US and Canadian military are tracking Santa with private money, and you can bet on the results, all due to a typo.
It is the season when people’s gaze is waylaid by the shiny, sparkling, colorful paraphernalia of Christmas attention-seeking, and so it is increasingly difficult to write about an important topic not sprinkled with holiday jollity. My feeble attempt to gain readers a couple of years ago depicted Santa as a Marxist monster. That was, of course, only in jest. That is just all the superstitions about Christmas. This year, the topic is much more serious. As you might have guessed from all his appearances in the seasonal Coca-Cola advertisement, Santa is, in fact, a champion of free markets.
Many companies want to capitalize on Christmas. Sears was one of them. Decades ago, however, they made a typo in their ad to call a phone number if you see Santa. The typo led people to call the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) a US and Canadian joint military command.
The military was also quick to use this as a marketing opportunity, and thus, the military-run Santa Tracker was born. However, no taxpayers are hurt in the process; it is funded by private companies also wanting a piece of the Christmas cake.
The military benefits, so do companies, but in a truly win-win scenario brought to you only by free markets, you can now bet on it. Polymarket, the online betting market, has a trending topic: How many gifts will Santa deliver in 2025? It will be resolved by the data published by the Santa Tracker.
Polymarket is lauded as a new tool to predict outcomes of various topics, such as crypto prices, politics, or sports. The company claims that it has 91.9% accuracy within 1 month, and 95.4% four hours before the resolution of a given market. The more money bet, the more accurate the prediction is. The company also claims to be more accurate than polls, as they only take snapshots.
Polymarket, however, is criticized for being able to influence elections by showing a prediction which through the bandwagon effect, could attract more people to the winner. Donald Trump Jr. happens to be an investor and an advisory board member at Polymarket.
People can bet on many things, and even topics deemed boring for anyone else but analysts, such as politics, are commercialized. Is that a problem, though? Behind the syrupy kitsch of Christmas, there is no religious tradition anymore. The age of enlightenment, the industrial revolution, and free markets created the modern Christmas tradition. One can go to Christmas mass, celebrating the birth of baby Jesus, but at home, beneath the tree with all the gifts, we celebrate the comfort and prosperity brought on by free markets.
Polymarket is also the product of free markets and is a valuable tool amongst many to look at and analyse data and how the market swings. At the market about Santa’s gifts, the majority bets 8.1-8.2 billion gifts will be delivered, and the volume of the market is a whopping 1,228,684 dollars. It is good to see people tackle the commercial aspect of Christmas seriously.
Happy holidays!
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