As we head into the Christmas shopping season, yours truly regrets to inform readers that the relative frequency of late-November media mentions of the "Christmas shopping season" is at the lowest level in all of the years I have been tracking it — probably meaning that it's at an all-time low, period.
This is Year 11 of an effort which began in 2005. Each year has involved Google News searches on "Christmas shopping season" and "holiday shopping season" (both terms in quotes). In the past few years, after Google News merged its archive with its regular one-month news results, I've made sure to only search on the past month. As seen in the graph which follows, this year's result is down to one "Christmas" mention for every 16.5 "holiday" mentions:
Late-November "Christmas shopping season" frequency stayed above 10 percent until 2008, and has only returned to that level once since then. This year's 5.7 percent frequency (2,130 "Christmas shopping season results and 35,300 "holiday shopping season" results) is the lowest ever, and is 56 perent lower than the peak result of 13.0 percent seen in 2006.
I suppose one can debate whether there has been a "war on Christmas" in general during the past decade, but there certainly has been a war on mentioning "Christmas" in connection with commerce during that time — and "Christmas" is losing bigtime.
Two more searches will occur roughly two weeks and four weeks from now. I anticipate reporting on those results when I obtain them. Usually, the relative frequency of "Christmas" mentions goes up a bit in later searches. We'll have to see if that history repeats itself this year to an extent sufficient to make up for the horribly slow start.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
