The Most Christmas-Obsessed States & Towns in America, According to Google Data
Are you the type to hang your Christmas lights and crank up the Christmas music as soon as your Thanksgiving dishes are done? Do your friends, family and neighbors pale in comparison to your love for the holidays? You may be obsessed with Christmas but don’t worry — you are not alone! We at Trips to Discover can’t get enough of Christmas either and set out to find the states and towns that are obsessed with Christmas as much as we are.
Our Most Interesting Findings
- West Virginia grabs the top spot as the state with the most Christmas cheer this century.
- Crocker, Missouri, is the most Christmas-obsessed town in the country.
- Christmas reigns supreme in The South, housing the top four most Christmas-obsessed states: Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama and West Virginia.
- The average population of the most Christmas-obsessed town in every state is just under 15,000.
We extracted over 1,000 Christmas-related search data points from Google Trends for a peripheral view of the most Christmas-obsessed states in the U.S. Then, we dug deeper and pulled over 20,000 Christmas-related search data points for over 5,000 locations to find each state’s most Christmas-obsessed town in the U.S.
Fun Facts
- Not only does West Virginia have the most Christmas cheer in the country, but it is also home to one of the nation’s largest light festivals, traversing over 300 acres!
- As a proportion of total searches, Crocker, Missouri, residents search for Christmas-related keywords more than any town in the country.
- Alabama was the first state to declare Christmas a legal holiday; it’s no surprise they came in second place as the state with the most Christmas cheer.
- What is the most Christmas-obsessed town in the state that loves Christmas the most? Chester, West Virginia!
- Famous for its year-round Christmas-themed attractions, Santa Claus, Indiana, lands in second place as the most Christmas-obsessed city — that’s right, there’s a town named Santa Claus.
- Coming in fifth place, Utah is an oasis of Christmas spirit in The West. It is also home to the largest proportion of Christian adherents in the nation — a striking 78% — according to a 2010 study by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB).
- Trailing behind in 37th place, New Jersey is far from the most Christmassy state in the U.S., but Roseland, New Jersey, ties for the fourth-most Christmas-obsessed community in the country.
Dive In:
The two tables below rank all 50 states from most to least Christmas cheer and shows the town in every state that is obsessed with Christmas the most. Towns are also ranked! Find out if your town made the list and how it compares to other Christmas-zealous cities.
Methodology
This study’s visualizations were created with Google Trends data to analyze Christmas interest for all 50 States (including D.C.) and over 5,000 cities and towns in the U.S.
We used three metrics for our state analysis:
- Google searches from 1/1/2004-11/23/2021 for “Christmas Day,” “Santa Claus,” “Christmas Tree,” “Christmas Lights,” “Christmas Music,” “Christmas Card,” “Christmas Gift,” “Christmas Decorations,” “Grinch” and “Christmas Vacation.”
- Google searches for Christmas songs in the past five years.
- Google searches for Christmas movies in the last five years.
Using the same control keywords in each search allowed all results to scale identically. The control words are more popular than any keyword in a search but not too popular that locations with minor popularity normalize to zero. Our control words for the Christmas songs and movies metrics were “Shape of You” and “Avengers: Endgame,” respectively. Data for the Christmas keywords metric was pulled one keyword at a time and did not require a control word.
We obtained our rankings by calculating the weighted average for each state across these metrics — 50% Christmas keywords and 25% Christmas movies and songs each.
We applied a similar methodology to the city-level analysis using Google searches from 1/1/2004-11/23/2004 for “Christmas,” “Santa,” “Christmas Tree,” and “Christmas Lights.” Our control word for this analysis was “Youtube.”
To focus our study on cities, towns and villages, we removed unincorporated communities and areas only census-designated places (CDPs) from our Google Trends data.
City population estimates were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau.
You can download our analysis in its entirety (.xlsx format) here.
Tableau, Flourish Studio, Microsoft Excel and Google Trends are the tools used to analyze and create data visualizations for this study.
