In this blog post, we’ll take some holiday-themed data for a spin. Learn about what U.S. states produce the most Christmas trees, trends in holiday spending, when the shopping season started, and more. We made the interactive graphs using Plotly’s web app and APIs. To securely share graphs and data within a team and make interactive dashboards, contact us about Plotly on-premise.
1. What States Harvest the Most Christmas Trees?
Oregon is the top harvesting state, with an output of 37.22% of U.S. Christmas trees. North Carolina is a distant second at 24.76%. Learn to make choropleth maps like this one in Plotly.
2. When Does the Holiday Shopping Season Begin?
While “Black Friday” is traditionally known as the start of the holiday shopping season, some folks get going even earlier than that. In fact, in 2015, 23% of shoppers began before November! The procrastination nation makes up 44% of all shoppers who start after December begins. Learn to make a simple line graph in Plotly.
3. How Much are People Spending?
The estimate of average 2015 Christmas spending is at its highest point, $830, since 2007’s pre-recession amount of $866. 2015 also has the third-highest spending estimate in the last 16 years.
4. Ornaments in 3D
Hey! Look! Its a Christmas ornament in 3D! You can toggle to zoom in and out, or click and drag to flip and spin the plot. For more graphs like this, check out our post on 3D graphs.
5. Holiday Legacy
Our next graph shows the relative birth rates in the US on every day of the year (1 being the most common day, 366 being the least common. Note that we reversed the y axis to emphasize that the lowest rank (1) is the most common day). We linearly shifted the units and converted days to months, so that the x axis shows the number of months after 12/25, rather than the date itself (9/25 is 9 months after 12/25). Each point represents a single day. The data pretty clearly spikes near the end of September, nine months after the holidays :) .
6. Happy New Year!
This graph of tweets related to New Year’s when 2011 rolled to 2012 comes from this blog post. We’re showing total tweets (worldwide) which relate in some way to the New Year. We see spikes in around midnight near midnight in the largest population centers: Europe, the Americas, and Asia.
