Christmas Holiday Fun Facts
Enjoy MERIC’s fun facts covering all of your holiday favorites: Shopping, decorating, snowfall chances, tree selection and more. Have a holly jolly Christmas!
Shopping
1/3
The portion of consumers that buy items the last week before Christmas.
Busiest Shopping Days
The Saturday and Sunday before Christmas.
99%
The percentage of
malls with extended holiday hours. On average they begin November
23, the day after Thanksgiving.
57%
The percentage of mall
based gift certificates/cards redeemed during the month of January.
1,050
The average number of
gifts wrapped per mall for the 2007 holiday season.
$23 Billion
The value of retail sales by electronic shopping and mail order houses in December 2007.
White Christmas
22
The number of Christmas mornings that have been white
or had an inch or more of snow on the ground in the past 114 years
in St. Louis.
18 to 23
The
percent chance of having a white Christmas in Missouri this year.
2005
The year
of the last white Christmas in St. Louis when one inch of snow was
observed Christmas morning.
Santa's Helpers
6 hours
The time it takes the
average mall to decorate for the holiday season, with some taking as
long as 20 hours.
Jingle
Bells
The most frequently
played holiday song in shopping malls last year.
White
Christmas
The second most
frequently played holiday song last year in shopping malls.
3,750
The average number of candy canes given out by Santa during the 2007 holiday season.
162
The average number that visited Santa per day during the 2007 holiday season.
Christmas Tree Facts
$493 Million
Sales by U.S. Christmas tree farmers in 2007.
Pine and
Fir
The best selling types
of Christmas tree including: Scotch pine, Douglas fir, Noble fir,
Fraser fir, Virginia pine, Balsam fir and White pine.
50
The number of states
that grow Christmas trees, including Hawaii and Alaska.
7 to 10
The average number of
years it takes for a Christmas tree to mature.
21,000
The
number of Christmas tree growers in the United States.
12,000
The
number of cut-your-own farms in the United States.
92,483
Missouri’s crop of cut
Christmas trees, last reported for 2002.
Environmentally friendly
Farm-raised Christmas
trees remove dust and pollen from the air and are often recycled.
US Postal Service
20 Billion
Pieces of mail the U.S. Postal Service expected to deliver between Thanskgiving and Christmas 2008.
December 17th
The busiest mailing day of the holiday season.
275 Million
Pieces of mail delivered on the peak mailing day.
Sources:
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/lsx/?n=whitechristmas
http://www.bls.gov
http://www.census.gov/mrts/www/mrts.html
http://www.urbanext.uiuc.edu/trees/treefacts.html
http://www.icsc.org/
http://www.agcensus.usda.gov
http://www.ers.usda.gov
http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/article
National Climatic Data Center Research Customer Service Group
