Celebrating a Mega-Holiday of Tradition, Emotion, and Experience in The Season

The holidays generate staggering numbers – in calories, dollars, and even terawatts. But what truly matters is immeasurable. It’s the billions of hearts filled with love, the countless “I love yous”' that will be uttered in the coming days, and the magic of belief.

Estimating how many times we’ll hear José Feliciano’s 1970 Christmas tune 'Feliz Navidad' in public spaces over the next few weeks is tricky. However, one good data metric for its enduring popularity is Spotify streams: over half a billion.

As Feliciano reminds us repeatedly, it is indeed “The Season”. At data.world , we usually ponder data’s scale, scope, and exponential growth. But during the holidays, we can pause to reflect on the aggregation of traditions, emotions, and experiences that make this time of year unique.

We are now amidst what is really a mega-holiday, one that runs from October through January, as a season of love, giving, and celebration. For me, it begins with the Hindu Festival of Diwali, a set of rites that includes the celebration of the triumph of good over evil, as I have so many Indian American friends (as well as friends in India itself). We go on through Thanksgiving, that day of reconciliation created by the Native American Tisquantum, who saved the Pilgrims in their first challenging year in the New World (I wrote about this last week.) It includes Chanukah, which, for we Jews, is the Festival of Lights, a celebration of resilience, identity, and tradition. And of course the mega-holiday continues with Christmas, the biggest holiday of the year from a capitalist and numbers celebrating perspective!

The convergence of old and new calendars, lunar and solar, causes holiday dates to shift from year to year, spot to spot. Among Christians, for example, December 25 on the Julian calendar—used by many Eastern Orthodox communities—corresponds to January 7 on the Gregorian calendar, which is widely followed in the West. The season’s torrent of love and sharing also includes such tributaries as Kwanzaa, a cultural celebration established in the 1960s that honors unity, family, and community in African traditions (and I have so many Black American friends as well as dear friends in Africa too.) The season continues with New Year’s, a time for reflection and renewal, and culminates at the end of January with the Lunar New Year. This finale is what we know as “Chinese New Year,” marked in the Confucian world by family reunions and acts of giving.

A quantifiable mega-event

As a quantifiable mega-event, The Season is a formidable force of information and data.

There are, of course, a lot of ways to ponder the data of the holidays throughout the year and the influence they have. For example, while the black powder typically used in America’s July 4th fireworks has a joule density of only about a fourth that of TNT, it would still pack a 40.6 kiloton punch if all 250 million pounds of Independence Day fireworks were consolidated into a single bomb. That’s 2.7 times the destructive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima!

Or consider the 250 million roses we’ll buy and share on St. Valentine’s Day (my birthday). More than 70% will come from Colombia, which exports four billion roses each year to the United States. Our role in the consumption of roses directly employs 110,000 Colombians, with 65% of them women — a large number of whom are heads of households.

At Easter, we take a big bite out of the world’s 7.5 million ton annual consumption of chocolate. That consumption is the source of crucial primary income to some six million cocoa workers, and 50 million family and associated dependents in the $1.4 billion worldwide trade. Labor Day marks the end of hotdog season, which begins with Memorial Day. Between the two dates, we ate seven billion hot dogs. I could go on.

So let’s come back to Christmas. Yes it’s a Christian holiday, though one fused with many pagan rites such as the trees, reindeer, and no small dash of Madison Avenue. But in today’s cultural context, I broadly define the season to include the majorities of Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and assorted Deists and even atheist communities who acknowledge it all with a tree, a stocking hung some place amid joyful memories, perhaps a hoisted eggnog.

As a vegetarian who sincerely cares about the care of animals, it is tough to ponder the fate of the 46 million turkeys we ate on Thanksgiving Day, or the number of pigs that will provide some 30 million hams as Christmas Eve dinner. But I will partake in one or two of the 360 million glasses of champagne we will down on New Year’s Eve. Or I will try, as I will celebrate in a remote part of India – as one of the 7.5 million Americans who will break international holiday travel records this year. Our daughter, Rachel, and I are going to our first wedding in India - a three-day event!

The holiday season in data

A few data points on this holiday season:

• 4,500 calories per person: That’s what we averaged on Thanksgiving Day, more than double the daily recommendation for most adults.
• Subsidiary “days”: After Black Friday came Small Business Saturday (not a big hit) and Cyber Monday (I actually helped create Cyber Monday while serving on the Board of Directors at Shop.org!) More recent innovations include Giving Tuesday in support of charities and Green Mondays, in solidarity with environmental causes. The newest is Travel Tuesday. McKinsey hints (with caveats) that fast-growing Travel Tuesday could rival Cyber Monday in share of ecommerce revenues.
• Vegan turkeys: As mentioned above, we eat a lot of animals on the holiday, So as a vegetarian, I prefer to focus on the rise of plant-based alternatives—4.5 million vegan turkeys were consumed in 2021 alone. I’m not a Tofurkey fan personally, but I have other vegan favorites.
• Annual energy needs of 500,000 U.S. Homes: That is six terrawatts of power. It is also the cost of Thanksgiving as measured in units of energy for cooking, television-watching, and transportation (air and ground).

• Enough juice to power 14 million refrigerators for a year: That would take more energy, close to seven terrawattts, which is the equivalent of what we’ll burn on outdoor holiday lights and installations this December.
• $1 billion in fake trees: Yup, that’s the annual spend, with 80% made in China. But even more to the point, China 2023 exported $5.7 billion in Christmas decorations in 2023.
• PwC says we’ll spend about $1,600 per person on the holidays: It adds up to a retail cache of between $979.5 billion and $989 billion. That retail turnover, now almost $1 trillion, is roughly equal to the GDP of Saudi Arabia.
• Believers in Santa Clause at age 4: 85% of U.S. children. The figure diminishes to 25% at age 8, and then to virtually no belief in Santa at ages 10 and above. 

While the holidays generate staggering numbers—calories, dollars, and even terawatts—what truly matters is immeasurable. It’s the billions of hearts filled with love, the countless “I love yous” that will be uttered in the coming days, and the magic of believing, even if only for a short time.

As newspaper editor Francis Church famously wrote to eight-year-old Virginia in 1897, Santa Claus exists because love, generosity, and joy exist. That’s how I feel about the mega-celebration. In the coming days, we will live these truths, making the season special for generations to come. 

This season of holiday gives life its highest beauty and joy. And I love it, data and all! I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving and have beautiful plans for the holiday break.