For many kids throughout the world, it’s time to make up that Christmas wish list and check it twice. Now in the past, kids were restricted to using the postal mail system to get their requests in to Santa Claus before Christmas Eve.

Then with the advancement of the Internet, Santa wised up and began taking in email requests from those who were a little more tech savvy. An improvement to be sure, but Santa’s elves quickly became overburdened with email as they found themselves sifting through a bundle of Viagra ads and phishing schemes. In short, the elves were growing restless and for a time there, it looked as if a strike was imminent. Had it not been for the Starbucks outlet opening up inside of Santa’s workshop, things could have gotten ugly real quick. Luckily for Santa, coffee acts a tranquilizer to elves.

Hey, it was either ushering in the coffee franchise or firing all of the elves, only to outsource their jobs to Oompa Loompas. At the time, it seemed like the lesser of two evils.

Well, once things finally settled down a bit, something wonderful happened. Santa was struck by an idea to alleviate his growing cranky elf problem: utilize WeatherBug’s youCaster video technology to streamline the incoming gift requests! After all, the technology already existed and Santa had been using WeatherBug data for some time, now, when plotting out his yearly course. (What, you thought he used ESP to avoid those dangerous winter storms?) So for the big man in red, it was a match made in Heaven!

A short time later, Santa and WeatherBug worked out a deal that empowered the world’s children to submit their most recent wish list(s) to Santa directly, thus eliminating the need for any unruly elf intervention.

Unlike other past methods of holiday wish list submission, youCaster allows its users to show Santa exactly what they have in mind. Simply drag and drop pictures of your favorite items right into your video wish list in progress, then submit it. Santa will then email the user his receipt acknowledgment via email.

Now some of you might be tempted to call this a strategic partnership between WeatherBug and Santa’s “North Pole Enterprises, Inc.” Speaking for myself, I like to think of it as the next logical progression of Christmas wish list management. Yeah, this could very well be the beginning of Christmas Wish Lists 2.0.

Tags: weather, holiday, video, santa