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Where Do Your Christmas Decorations Come From?

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Where Do Your Christmas Decorations Come From?

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The World’s Biggest Exporters of Christmas Decorations

Billions of dollars worth of Christmas decorations are exported around the world each year.

And while they adorn many homes across the globe, you may be surprised to know that a majority of these decorations are manufactured in just a handful of countries.

Using data from the UN Comtrade Database, this festive visualization highlights the world’s top exporters of Christmas decor.

Ranked: Top 10 Exporters of Christmas Decorations

China accounts for 87% of global Christmas decoration exports (excluding candles, electric lighting sets, and natural Christmas trees), with a total export value of $6.62 billion in 2020.

Here are the top 10 countries by export volume:

RankCountryMarket Share
Year 2020
Export value
Year 2020
1🇨🇳 China87.61%$6,623,948,022
2🇳🇱 Netherlands3.95%$298,587,959
3🇵🇱 Poland0.91%$68,670,015
4🇮🇳 India0.84%$63,605,927
5🇩🇪 Germany0.83%$63,035,762
6🇺🇸 United States0.77%$58,045,102
7🇭🇰 Hong Kong0.51%$38,344,945
8🇧🇪 Belgium0.43%$32,787,984
9🇹🇭 Thailand0.43%$32,365,786
10🇬🇧 United Kingdom0.33%$24,580,583

China’s market share dwarfs its competitors. Netherlands comes a distant second, capturing only 3.95% of the market, while Poland is third with just 0.91%.

Another interesting fact we can extract from the data is that the top 10 countries own a 96.91% share of the Christmas decoration export market, which leaves just 3.09% of the market to the other 185 countries around the globe.

The Other Side of the Coin: Imports

We’ve covered who the biggest exporters of Christmas decorations are, but this begs the question—which countries are importing all of this festive fare?

Here are the top five countries by import volume:

RankCountryMarket Share
Year 2019
Market Share
Year 2020
Import value
Year 2020
1🇺🇸 United States58.17%57.34%$3,054,607,847
2🇬🇧 United Kingdom5.18%5.07%$270,152,835
3🇨🇦 Canada4.54%5.00%$266,304,196
4🇩🇪 Germany2.69%2.99%$159,401,785
5🇳🇱 Netherlands2.55%2.93%$156,000,611

The United States is by far the biggest importer of Christmas decorations, importing 57.34% of the total market share of Christmas decorations with a total value of $3 billion.

The top five importers have a market share of 73.33% with a total value of $3.9 billion.

Why Are Christmas Decorations More Expensive This Year?

Yiwu, a Chinese city situated 175 miles southwest of Shanghai, is the world’s biggest hub for manufacturing Christmas decorations, accounting for nearly 80% of the Christmas products exported from China.

Factories in Yiwu are suffering a shortage of raw materials which is causing an increase in production costs.

On top of that, since mid-October, Yiwu, like many other cities, has been affected by China’s ongoing electricity shortage, which has forced manufacturers to install power generators or even stop their manufacturing activities altogether.

As if that wasn’t enough, shipping from China has become a lot more expensive in 2021. Over the past year, it’s become 4x more expensive to ship a standard container from China to Europe.

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History

Visualized: The Daily Routines of Famous Creatives

The daily routines of 16 famous creatives—poets, thinkers, scientists and even politicians—are charted for comparison with each other.

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A grid of donut charts showing how 16 great artists, writers, and thinkers spent their day, with colored slots accounting for work, leisure and sleep.

Visualized: The Daily Routines of Famous Creatives

What is the best daily routine to unlock creativity, or is there such a thing?

Many modern suggestions for optimizing creativity—like scheduling time for “deep work,” and building small, sustainable “atomic habits”—can be traced back to famous creatives in many different eras. And though they all found success, they employed different methods as well.

In this unique visualization, RJ Andrews from InfoWeTrust has charted how notable creatives in different fields spent their days. He picked 16 of the 161 “inspired minds” covered by Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, a book by writer and editor Mason Currey published in 2013.

How Much “Creativity Time” in Famous Daily Routines?

Dividing the day into 24 hours, Andrews denoted certain categories for daily activities like working creatively, sleeping, and other miscellaneous endeavors (meals, leisure, exercise, and social time).

For the creatives with a separate day job—Immanuel Kant and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—their ordinary labor is also counted in miscellaneous activities.

Below is a breakdown of the daily routine of all 16 people featured above:

NameOccupationCreative (hrs)Sleep (hrs)Miscellaneous (hrs)
Maya AngelouWriter/Poet97.57.5
W.H. AudenPoet11.575.5
Honoré de BalzacNovelist13.58.52
L.V. BeethovenComposer / Pianist888
Le CorbusierArchitect8.578.5
Charles DarwinNaturalist / Biologist/ Geologist789
Charles DickensWriter5712
Gustave FlaubertNovelist10.576.5
Sigmund FreudPsychologist12.565.5
Benjamin FranklinWriter / Inventor / Scientist / Statesman879
Victor HugoWriter2814
Immanuel KantPhilosopher7710
Thomas MannNovelist888
John MiltonPoet879
W.A. MozartComposer / Pianist8511
P.I. TchaikovskyComposer4.5811.5

The average and median amount of time spent on creative work for these individuals was just over 8 hours a day. At the extremes were two French novelists, Honoré de Balzac with 13.5 hours daily spent on creative work, and Victor Hugo with only 2 hours.

Interestingly, the allocation of creative work time was different in almost every daily routine. Maya Angelou’s routine resembles the modern work day, with the bulk of her writing between 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Others like Kant and Mozart had creativity blocks when time allowed, such as before and after their teaching jobs.

Then there are outliers like Honoré de Balzac and Sigmund Freud, who worked as much as they could. Balzac wrote from 1:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. with just an hour and a half nap break in between, fueled by up to 50 cups of coffee. Freud split up his creative work into three different blocks: analyzing patients in the morning, consulting in the afternoon, and reading and writing journals into the late evening.

But somewhere in their days, most of these brilliant minds made sure to get a good rest, with an average of 7.25 hours of sleep across the board.

Schedule Yourself to Create Success

Creativity may ebb and flow, but these great minds had one clear thing in common: scheduling time for creative work.

The perfect daily routine was usually what fit in with their lifestyle (and their bodies), not based on an arbitrary amount of work. For example, night owls with later chronotypes worked late, while socialites and politicians found time outside of their commitments.

They also found time to move and enjoy life. Half of the people in the dataset specified exercise in their accounts—either leisurely strolls or fast walks. Many also scheduled social time with partners, friends, or children, often paired with a meal.

Perhaps the greatest insight, however, is that the day-to-day routine doesn’t have to look extraordinary to be able to create extraordinary work.

Much of the data is sourced from personal anecdotes by the artists themselves, or from biographers, researched and collected by Currey in Daily Rituals. In some cases, Andrews needed to assume habits — usually sleep — due to missing, or non-specific information.
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