Christmas in Data - No Sprouts, just Turkey.


Much like one of Santa’s Elves I’ve been working hard to bring you the latest data blog - not so much Product this time, but certainly data! All wrapped up in a pretty bow.

Now, before we all get stuck into Sprouts and Turkey on the 25th (I’ll be avoiding that one this year by taking extreme measures – leaving the Country!) I wanted to somehow combine the themes of Christmas and Data.

What I’ve come up with is of course something akin to Good King Wenceslas combined with the Dr Who Special. To start with we’ll look at Christmas cards.

David Cameron (aka Santa) has been busily sending cards to his nearest and dearest. Included on his list this year are the President of Kyrgyzstan, the Prime Minister of Chile and of course, the Pope. The Guardian have a great article about the full list and who’s made Dave’s ‘Naughty’ list (we’re looking at you South Africa).

Next up, Christmas Presents. I’ve found some nice data on US Christmas Shopping habits from last year. Did you know?

  • 19% of US Shoppers planned to go shopping on Boxing Day.
  • 77% planned to buy at least one gift card as a present – Lazy!
  • 20% planned to return at least one gift – Ungrateful!
  • 23 million people went shopping on Christmas Eve – Risky!
So to draw a conclusion from this, US shoppers are pretty similar to everyone else. Lazy, ungrateful, disorganised and shopaholics unable to take more than one day off from shopping. Humbug!

Of course, one of the most important (and fun) things about the winter holidays is the potential for snow! We all love getting our sleds out for one day a year, finding the nearest hill and taking our lives in our hands as we dodge the trees at the bottom (for those of you staying in London, replace ‘Hill’ with ‘submerged Bus’ and ‘Trees’ with ‘Hoodies’).

For the rest of you, looking at recent patterns will give you an idea. In 2010, the well published deluge resulted in 83% of Met Office weather stations recording snow on the ground on the 25th – a record! Snow or sleet even fell at 19% of the stations on that day. In 2009, 57% recorded snow on the ground.

However, such high percentages are rare. In only 4 years of the past 52 have we seen snow on the ground at more than 50% of Met Office weather stations. While recent history looks good, in general, the odds are against us!

To wrap things up (Christmas puns are funny), I’ve looked at some data on Christmas Trees. This was inspired by my recent trip to Experian in Nottingham when I passed through St Pancras. Did you know that the Christmas Tree on display there is made of over 400,000 Lego bricks and weighs 3 tonnes?

‘Lego Professional’ Duncan Titchmarsh (the UK’s ‘only’ professional) spent 3 nights putting it together and the 10 metre structure will be on display until 2nd January. What they do with it then is anyone’s guess but personally I’d turn it into a giant ‘DFS January Sale’ sign and leave it there for about 4 months..

Have a great winter break and remember that behind all of the carefully structured TV adverts, panel shows and Noel Edmonds beard are a lot of clever people using data, surveys, statistics and Lego to make Christmas magical and fun for all of the family.
Location: London Borough of Newham, London UK

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