Tis the Season: What Aspects of Holidays Interest Americans Most?
By Ainsley Cox
Throughout the year, Americans from around the country celebrate the changing seasons and the holidays that come and go with them. With Halloween out the door, many Americans are gearing up for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and more. Holidays emphasize family, friends, thankfulness, giving, and joy all around, but as the Fall and Winter season come around, groups can get into disagreements over which Holiday is best. So what is the most popular? And what about that holiday is the most beloved tradition?
The most popular holiday in the US, according to PYN, is Thanksgiving, followed by Christmas and Veterans Day. Collecting all Wikipedia page views in the US from December 1st, 2022 until now, it appears that for this past year, Halloween, Memorial Day, and Easter were the top most searched Wikipedia articles out of the Holidays.
From this graph, we can unsurprisingly see that the holidays’ popularity peaks around the time that they are occurring, and falls back down with the other holidays when it isn’t their season. The most consistently popular is Halloween, with Christmas and Thanksgiving falling close behind. Smaller holidays, like Easter and Memorial Day have substantial spikes, even higher or as high as the most consistent holidays.
So now we know that Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are consistently the most popular holidays searched up on Wikipedia for this past year. But why? What about these holidays is so appealing to Americans? To find that out, I compiled that number of page views for popular terms and traditions relating to the holidays to see how they compared to each other.
Lets start with Halloween. I settled on six features of Halloween to graph: pumpkin, Autumn, leaf peeping, pumpkin spice latte, ghost, and Halloween.
In this graph, we can see that the most popular Halloween related thing is the holiday itself, which slowly rises throughout Fall and peaks at the day itself. It is followed by the Fall season, Autumn. Also similarly popular is the most popular squash during the fall season, pumpkins and the term ghost, relating the the spooky nature of the holiday. It seems that ghost may be a popular term year round however, maintaining that page view number even outside of Fall. Leaf peeping and Pumpkin Spice Lattes (PSL) peak more before the holiday itself, with leaf peeing maintaining it’s highest page view count when the colors of the leaves are changing and the PSL reaching it’s peak when it was released into Starbucks stored again August.
Moving on to Thanksgiving, I chose Thanksgiving, Pilgrim, Turkey, Native Americans, Cranberry, Pumpkin Pie, and Mayflower. November is also Native American Heritage Month so it would make sense that you would see the number of page views going up for people who want to learn more about their history.
In this graph, we can see that the most consistently popular term is Native American, with highest peak belonging to Thanksgiving when Thanksgiving is occurring. Pilgrim and pumpkin pie are the least popular, but everything peaks on Thanksgiving and the days surrounding it. Cranberry and turkey stay pretty consistent throughout the entire year. These elements don’t drop nearly as much as the Halloween elements, which may be part of the explanation of why Thanksgiving is according to other sources, more popular.
Lastly, Christmas. for this holiday, I chose the terms Present, Skiing, Winter, Snow, Christmas, and Christmas Carol.
Christmas, like Halloween and Thanksgiving, is the most popular term, once again peaking during the actual days that it occurs. It is also consistently the most popular term out of all of them for the whole year. Winter is the second most consistently popular, followed closely by skiing and snow, though snow does go up a little during the times of year where it is snowing. Present is the least viewed, and Christmas carol is down there with it for most of the year util we see a massive spike during December and November.
The analysis in this article is coming from someone who celebrates all of these holidays and not some others that are popular in the US, so biases introduced are coming from the perspective of a white, non-religious, American woman. It is also important to note that Native Americans are not simply something that just goes with Thanksgiving, but a whole people who were thoroughly mistreated by the United States. It is important to acknowledge this, especially during Native American Heritage Month.
Throughout the year, Americans and people around the world love to celebrate with each other, whether it be for their favorite holiday or someone else’s. In the future, it would be interesting to compare and contrast these page view rates with other countries or those countries holidays. Whatever your favorite holiday is, celebrating it with the ones you love is sure to make it a really good one.
