No, not my two front teeth. What I want for Christmas is better ETF education.

It’s that time of the year when we look back. When we check that list and see if we’ve been naughty or nice, and make our wishes for next year. In that spirit, I did a mental inventory of naughty and nice for the ETF industry. Because I’m a giver.

On the one hand, the ETF industry starts with an awful lot going for it on Santa’s list. Exchange-traded products are universally better mousetraps for most investors, providing increased transparency, tax efficiency and economy compared with virtually any competitive offering. But we can always do better, right?

Compared with most investments, ETFs are made out of glass. But the influx of more active and more complex products has made this transparency less than it could be. As I pointed out in my piece on the Dent ETF (NYSEArca: DENT), there’s the letter of transparency, and the spirit. Yes, every ETF publishes its holdings daily, but is that really enough? Most investors, I assume, don’t check the Web sites of their ETFs every single day, keeping track of portfolio moves, and they shouldn’t have to.

ETF issuers who really want to get on Santa’s good list should take a lead from iShares. While still not the daily history I’d like, anyone can go to the iShares Web site and select any monthly holdings file for any month going back for many years. Want to know what was in the Dow Jones U.S. Regional Banks Index Fund (NYSEArca: IAT) back in the worst of the credit crisis? It’s there.

But transparency is more than just data, it’s accessibility, and iShares comes out on top there too. Pretty much any table of data you can see on the iShares Web site is accompanied by an “Export to Excel” button. What to know when the data is refreshed? They publish an excruciatingly detailed schedule so you know when to check. Complete NAV, index level and tracking error history are available with one click for every ETF at iShares. This commitment to making data not only available but usable puts iShares at the top of the “Nice” list.

But iShares could learn a thing or two from State Street Global Advisors on the transparency front. While the SPDRs.com Web site doesn’t make it so easy to get data, it does provide great commentary on the individual ETFs and how they work. Unfortunately, a lot of it is behind the registration screen, which means many investors simply won’t look at the materials; and yes, it’s all marketing. But State Street’s portfolio tools, or their marketing materials, on using ETFs in a falling dollar environment, or their work on SPDR University, are all high watermarks.

Perhaps this is unfair, expecting the entire industry to step up to the level of the two largest players in the ETF industry. But I don’t think so. After all, many of the smaller players are offering niche strategies, based on less well-known, often proprietary indexes. The active ETF issuers aren’t even working with an index. By offering anything less than the gold-standard level of disclosure, they’re asking investors to take more on faith precisely with products that are already a leap of faith.

My last Christmas wish applies to every ETF issuer: Embrace outbound communications. Yes, it’s great that iShares will show me every month’s holdings. But why not just let me choose to follow a list of ETFs and email me any time there’s a change in their holdings? How else am I supposed to track how much exposure I may have to a certain company or a certain sector?

Back when ETFs were all based on massive, slow-moving indexes, this might not have mattered. But with monthly rebalancing as the norm, monthly reconstruction not uncommon and daily trading on the horizon, stepping up to the kinds of outbound notifications I get from my local dentist doesn’t seem like a stretch.