energy helps power a merry and bright season

Twinkling lights. Delicious meals with the family. Travel to see loved ones. Brown paper packages tied up with string and delivered to your doorstep.

These are a few favorite things during the holidays, and energy helps make them happen. Here are some fun facts about the power behind the season.

Close to 80 million Americans were predicted to hit the road or take to the skies to visit loved ones over the Thanksgiving holiday, according to the American Automobile Association (AAA). Of these travelers, 71.74 million were expected to travel by auto, 5.84 million by air and 2.28 million by other modes of transportation such as buses, trains and cruise lines.

’Tis the season to ship! The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has been preparing for the holiday season, increasing its package processing capacity to 60 million packages a day, enough for two packages per person in the whole state of Texas. That’s triple what the USPS could process per day in 2020.

What do you do when reindeer power isn’t an option? Use a jet engine, of course, preferably one that uses sustainable aviation fuel.

That takes a different kind of energy, and some students at the University of Leicester in Leicester, U.K., calculated just how much power it would take to get Santa’s gift-laden sleigh off the ground: 38 million newtons of thrust.

That’s about the same as 150 jumbo jet engines or what it took to launch the Saturn V rocket on the Apollo missions. That rocket, which carried the first humans to the moon, used 4,578,000 pounds of fuel.

The students didn’t stop there. They figured Santa’s sleigh would need to be speedy to keep aloft, moving at 5,500 meters per second. That’s about 10 times the speed of sound!

It takes energy to keep the lights on at night to ring in the new year. It also takes a different kind of energy to stay awake until midnight. In the U.S., most adults stay up to see the clock strike 12, according to a survey by YouGov. While approximately 77% say they sometimes, usually or always stay up to greet the new year, the rest say they rarely or never do, with about 2% unsure of what state of wakefulness they’re usually in at that time.

A 2015 report found that in the U.S., holiday lights use about 6.63 billion kilowatt hours of electricity each year. The average U.S. home consumes approximately 10,500 kilowatt hours of electricity a year. So that means holiday lights use more electricity than 631,000 homes—that’s nearly enough to power all the households in Philadelphia for a year!

And those lights are going up with plenty of time to enjoy them. According to a survey by This Old House, approximately 70% of decorating Americans put up their holiday lights in November or even sooner.

Americans consume around 46 million turkeys during the holiday season. Depending on the size of the bird and the type of oven, roasting a turkey can use between 8 and 11.5 kilowatt hours of energy. Multiply that by the number of turkeys, and you have between 368 million and 529 million kilowatt hours of energy spent on the centerpiece of many a holiday feast. That translates to about enough energy to power between 34,000 and 49,000 U.S. homes for a year.

Chevron is proud to help power modern life, no matter what time of year it is. Our teams work diligently to provide the energy that keeps the lights on. And that means some employees spend holidays with their Chevron family. Take a look at how our employees celebrate the holidays when stationed offshore.