NEW research claims Warrington is the 2nd least Christmassy city in the UK – with the local spending just £17,886 on Christmas decorations in 2019.
But what the study didn’t take into account is that Warrington’s Christmas lights are fixed in place all year round, to reduce installation costs and the lights installed at Golden Square, which are at no cost to the council.
It also didn’t take into account the huge effort made by many residents who light up the town with fantastic displays!
The study from Christmas Tree World claims to show the cities that put the least effort into being Christmassy.
Their research looked at the amount spent on decorations/lights switch on, annual searches for Christmas trees and festive hashtag mentions.
They analysed each town and city on the following four factors, giving each place a normalised score out of ten for each factor, before taking an average of these four scores for their final festive score out of ten.
In some instances, no event took place in 2020 due to the COVID pandemic, so in these instances, they took the date of the 2019 event. The earlier the lights were switched on in a town or city, the higher it scored.
A Freedom of Information request was sent to the councils of each of the towns and cities, requesting the total amount spent on the 2019 lights switch-on event and the cost of lights and decorations
They also took into account the total number of Google searches made by people looking to buy Christmas trees in the last twelve months (September 2020-August 2021) according to Google Ads’ Keyword Planner.
They also took into account the number of Instagram posts mentioning the Christmas celebrations in the town. For each place, the hashtag with the highest number of posts was used, for example the city named followed by “Christmas” or “Christmas markets”.
But what they didn’t take into account is the Christmas spirit of thousands of Warringtonians! Bah humbug!
*While Warrington is a town, it is classed as a city in many UK surveys due to its size.
