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Media uses Christmas over holiday season

Posted on: Monday, 22 December 2008, 11:30 CST

The global media uses the term Christmas more than 600 percent more often than the less specific term holiday season, a U.S. language group says.

The Global Language Monitor of Austin, Texas, said in a news release that while holiday season is typically seen as more secular worldwide, Christmas was used in nearly 85 percent of all global media citations.

Holiday season was the second-most used term, accounting for nearly 13 percent of all global citations. Xmas came in third in the survey with 1.5 percent of all citations.

Those results were nearly identical compared to the group's analysis of holiday citations on the Internet. Christmas once again came in first with nearly 81 percent of Internet usage, but Xmas topped holiday season for second with nearly 11 percent compared to season's more than 5 percent.

We thought it would prove interesting to see how the holidays are actually represented in the global media, GLM President Paul JJ Payack said. We were a bit surprised to see that the much discussed secularization of Christmas in the media was nowhere as widespread as speculated.

Source: United Press International

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