Christmas by the Numbers
Religion & Liberty Online

Christmas by the Numbers

christmasnumbersAs the most widely observed cultural holiday in the world, Christmas is a time of produces many things — joy, happiness, gratitude, reverence. And numbers. Lots of peculiar, often large, numbers. Here are a few to contemplate this season:

$34.87 – Average amount U.S. consumers spent on real Christmas trees.

33,000,000 – Number of real Christmas trees sold in the U.S. each year.

7 – Average growing time in years for a Christmas tree.

$70.55 – Average amount U.S. consumers spent on fake Christmas trees in 2011.

9,500,000 – Number of fake Christmas trees sold each year.

$27.21 — The energy costs of lighting a six-foot Christmas tree, lit 12 hours a day for 40 days, decorated with various light types.

$1,000,000,000 – Estimated value of U.S. imports of Christmas tree ornaments from China between January and September 2013.

$3,000,000,000,000 – Amount generated by the U.S. retail industry during the holidays in 2012. These holiday sales reflected about 19.3 percent of the retail industries total sales that year.

$720,000 – Number of new employees hired to compensate for the holiday rush in 2012.

37.5% — Estimated percentage of charitable giving that occurs between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.

$712 – Average amount people in the U.S. spent in on Christmas presents in 2010. In Italy average expenditure amounted to around 325 euros ($445). The Dutch came out as the most thrifty. Spending on Christmas presents in the Netherlands in 2010 averaged at 206 euros ($282).

108,000,000 — Average number of homes Santa Claus has to visit on December 25 (assuming there is at least one “nice” child in each).

Joe Carter

Joe Carter is a Senior Editor at the Acton Institute. Joe also serves as an editor at the The Gospel Coalition, a communications specialist for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and as an adjunct professor of journalism at Patrick Henry College. He is the editor of the NIV Lifehacks Bible and co-author of How to Argue like Jesus: Learning Persuasion from History's Greatest Communicator (Crossway).