Today I Learned There Are Actually Four North Poles

You may think the North Pole is at 90 degrees latitude, opposite the South Pole. It’s true that the northernmost point on earth, in the middle of an almost permanently frozen Arctic Ocean, is a place we refer to as the North Pole. It’s where Santa Claus is said to live. But according to our research there are actually four North Poles (and for that matter, three Santa Clauses). Along with these revelations, you’ll find over 170 cities on the map below that have names you may find especially festive this time of year.

View Christmas Themed Cities in a full screen map

As with the Halloween-themed scary place names, we’ve prepared a map with Christmas-themed names. You can use the map above to explore these locations, or type your zip code or city name in the form below to find the Christmasy place nearest you. (Apologies to those who don’t celebrate the holiday, though you’ll find plenty of secular names in the group—Snow, anyone?)

Alas, the North Pole is still exactly where you expect it. But there are four other places in the United States that also claim the name: North Pole, Alaska, is the most well-known, and the closest to the actual location and climate. Still, if you’re in Idaho, New York, or Oklahoma, you also have a North Pole.

The most common city names are listed below, each with at least five states that have dubbed a place with this Christmas or holiday-themed name.

Name Number States
Star 13 Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, and Virginia
Bell 10 Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Michigan, and Oklahoma
Snow 7 Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Utah
Shepherd 7 Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Tennessee, and Texas
Comet 6 Arkansas, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia
Garland 6 Maine, Nebraska, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Utah
Evergreen 6 Alabama, Colorado, Louisiana, Montana, North Carolina, and Virginia
Bethlehem 6 Connecticut, Indiana, Maryland, Mississippi, New Hampshire, and New York
Chestnut 6 Alabama, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, and West Virginia
Christmas 5 Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Michigan, and Mississippi
Jolly 5 Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, and Texas
Bells 5 Mississippi, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas
Atlers 5 California, Colorado, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Virginia
Rudolph 5 Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin

Star is the most common, unless you combine the Bell and Bells. Surprisingly, there are only five Christmases, though that would increase if we included the four similarly-rooted Christmas City, Christmas Cove, Christmas Valley, and Christmasville.

As mentioned above, there are three Santa Clauses, but the jolly man has some Saint Nicknames. There are four Saint Nicholases and in Idaho it’s just Santa (no Claus). The man in the red suit has far fewer namesakes than his reindeer. Between the nine flyers, there are 18 cities named after reindeer, Comet being the most common. And unlike the song, which suggests Rudolph gets ignored, it’s Dancer and Prancer who get no love, with not a single city named after either of them.

If you live in Michigan, you have the most Christmas-themed cities to choose from, with 10. Florida and Texas each have eight, then six states each have seven. There are nine states that aren’t feeling the spirit at all: Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, and Wyoming don’t have a single city with a Christmas theme.

If all this doesn’t have you singing like Hallelujah Junction, California, then we’ll close with the perfect place for you. Make your way to the sunny climes of Humbug, Arizona.

Map Your Holiday Cards List

Over half of Americans send a Christmas card or other holiday greeting toward the end of every year. That’s probably higher if you consider businesses sending notes to their customers and leads. If you’re one of the majority preparing this year’s bundle, you probably have a spreadsheet with the names and addresses of everyone on your list. Or, if you don’t have such a document, maybe you’ll think about starting one. Among the many benefits you get from an organized list of recipients is the ability to easily plot them on a map. We’ll go over that and more in this post.

Holiday Cards by LindsayThe first and best reason to keep a spreadsheet of addresses is organization. Physical address books become filled with redacted entries as people move. Or worse, the entries are outdated or duplicative. A spreadsheet allows you to search and update when you receive a new address. You can also easily share the document with someone else, such as a spouse or other family member. In fact, services like Google Spreadsheets let you share and make edits live, without ever sending around attachments.

Another good reason to keep a spreadsheet with all your addresses is, if you choose, you can mail merge the labels. This may be a controversial suggestion to some who believe in hand-lettering. That’s fine, you can still reap the spreadsheet benefits by printing out your list to make it easy to determine whose envelope you’ve already addressed.

For those sending customer greetings, you can likely export from your CRM software to a CSV or Excel spreadsheet. Either of those formats work great for mail merge and plotting your contacts on a map.

View Holiday Card List in a full screen map

You can see an example map above. At BatchGeo, our card list is short, but filled with a mix of rich, famous, and fictional. In fact, you can filter the map by those three types of people. If you have other information about the people on your list, include it in a column in your spreadsheet, then you can use the grouping feature the same way we did above. Perhaps you want to group by customers, leads, friends, acquaintances, or other attributes. If it’s in your spreadsheet, it will become a powerful, interactive map in BatchGeo.

Other fun things you’ll see from your map are where everyone lives. Are they all in the same city? Maybe they’re in a couple clumps around where you grew up and where you live now. You could even use basic map clustering to tabulate the areas with a greater number of contacts. This is especially useful when mapping sales leads, of course, but it’s fun to see even for your friends list.

So, dust off your spreadsheet of addresses, or make a new one. Then visualize that data on a BatchGeo map today.

Portlandia Counts Its Apple Trees

Portlandia fans will be tickled and Portlanders unsurprised to learn the Oregon city has performed a census of its apple trees. Just about every one of the fruit trees across Portland’s 145 square miles had its location, condition, and size notated in data that is downloadable by neighborhood from the city’s website. Since BatchGeo is a Portland company and we have a fun and easy mapping tool, we thought it was a perfect example to show off the over 1,000 apple trees that call Portland home.

View Apple Trees of Portland in a full screen map

At first you may notice that it appears there are areas of the city without any apple trees. That may be accurate for, say, downtown Portland. Already a five year project with more than 800 volunteers, the city hasn’t made it to every neighborhood yet. Still, with over 60% of the city enumerated, we can learn plenty about the apple trees.

For example, almost half of the trees are considered in good condition, while only 10% are in poor health. However, there doesn’t appear to be a particular area of the city that is bad for apple trees. The biggest is adjacent to Sewallcrest Park in Southeast Portland. At 38 inches diameter (measured at breast height), it’s a sizable apple tree, and an outlier in the neighborhood. There a place where the trees are bigger or smaller. All of Portland loves its apple trees.

In fact, Portland loves all its trees. The city even set the Guiness World Record in 2013 with almost 1,000 tree huggers, some of whom are shown in the video below.

And it turns out, the city doesn’t just count its apple trees. It counts all of its street trees. Over 100,000 of them, all with downloadable spreadsheets waiting to be uploaded to BatchGeo for visualization.

While Portland is ahead of many cities in open government data, you very likely can find some for your own city or country. In the United States there’s even a clearinghouse of these civic datasets called Data.gov. If you’re stuck on tree data, there’s currently 942 datasets matching that search term.

Open data can also be found all over Wikipedia. Rather than the Excel files common with government data, the worldwide encyclopedia often uses web-based tables that are easily copy and paste-able into your own spreadsheets–or directly to BatchGeo.

We show an example of copying, cleaning, and mapping Wikipedia data in our tutorial, How to Map Open Data.