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A lot of Christmas lights went up this past week. I hope you weren’t one of the thousands who ended up in the emergency room. USAFacts shows the ramp up after Thanksgiving and the mini-spikes after. [Thanks, Amber]
Tags: Christmas, emergency room, USAFacts
Posted by in christmas, emergency room, Statistical Visualization, USAFacts
You know it’s the holiday season when Mariah Carey starts singing about wanting you for Christmas. The Washington Post goes into why we listen to the same songs every year:
Holiday music burrows into a sweet spot in our brains’ wiring, said Brian Rabinovitz, a lecturer at the College of William & Mary whose expertise is the neuroscience of music.
All music can stimulate the brain’s pleasure centers, he said, but holiday music can evoke treasured memories on top of that, courtesy of the brain’s filing system. Tonal patterns and autobiographical events are processed in overlapping regions of the medial prefrontal cortex.
Kind of the same reasons why we watch re-runs.
See also Jon Keegan’s analysis of old Christmas songs.
Tags: Christmas, songs, Washington Post
Posted by in christmas, songs, Statistical Visualization, Washington Post
For The Washington Post, Tim Meko and Lauren Tierney:
Before the 1930s, Christmas trees typically were cut down on an individual’s property or out in the wild. Now, tree farms in all 50 states (yes, Hawaii too) are where most Christmas trees come from, accounting for 98 percent of live Christmas trees brought into homes. These farms churn out many kinds of conifers, but two main regions — Clackamas County near Portland, Ore., and the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina — produce the most.
I wonder if we can see a similar map for artificial Christmas trees.
Tags: Christmas, Lauren Tierney, Tim Meko, trees, Washington Post
Posted by in christmas, Lauren Tierney, maps, Tim Meko, trees, Washington Post
Jon Keegan scraped the playlist from the local radio station’s all-Christmas playlist for a few days. Then he looked at play counts and original composition dates:
Considering the year in which each song was written, my dataset spanned 484 years of published music. Of course, many of the older songs are considered “traditional” songs, without a clear writer or composer. One obvious thing about this genre is that it is rich with covers (performing a new version of someone else’s song). Of the 1,510 songs played over this period that I was examining, it turns out there are really only about 80 unique songs in the dataset. But from those 80 songs come lots of covers, medleys and live recordings.
Posted by in christmas, songs, Statistical Visualization
It’s been quite the year of randomness and things we never would have imagined at any other time before they occurred. So in the spirit of this year, here’s A Christmas Story for you.
I put it in the form of charts, because that’s the only way I know how to communicate. (It’s a problem, I know. I’m working on it. I mean come on, cut me some slack. It’s almost Christmas.)
In any case, as I was saying. Here are some Christmas charts for you. They may or may not be based on movies.
I think we can all agree ’tis the season to be with family and friends rather than Home Alone.
Or maybe you’re not quite there yet. I say just give it time. Maybe take a ride on the Polar Express towards the Miracle on 34th Street. You might see a Grinch or an Elf. Who knows? Keep an eye out for any lengthy Clauses though.
I think all in all, It’s a Wonderful Life.
And if you look, you’ll see that Love Actually is all around.
Merry Christmas.
Posted by in Chart Everything, christmas, movies