If you don't celebrate Christmas, you probably have your own traditions for Dec. 25. And if you're Jewish, you're probably familiar with the Christmas classic: a Chinese meal and a movie.
But is Christmas really a gravy train for Chinese restaurants, as this cultural stereotype suggests?
Over at Slate, Ben Blatt decided to crunch the numbers with the help of the delivery service GrubHub.
And this is what they came back with: On Christmas Day last year, the percentage of orders that were Chinese spiked by 152%, according to GrubHub's data.
But let's take that number with a grain of MSG. As Blatt points out, it's important to understand what the statistic really means. It's not that the total number of Chinese orders increased by 152% -- it's that Chinese food's share of the overall food delivery market went up by that amount. The size of the market itself was actually down, as you might expect. So to use a corporate food cliche, Chinese food took a bigger slice of a smaller pie. (These numbers reflect only nationwide GrubHub orders, not overall restaurant business.)
Other cuisines, including seafood, Muslim halal, Indian, dim sum, kosher, Thai and Vietnamese, also increased their share of GrubHub deliveries last Dec. 25. So the numbers may not prove that tons of people are seeking out Chinese food on Christmas Day; it may simply be that a smaller number of people are looking for whatever open restaurants they can find.
Chinese restaurants are often open on Christmas when others aren't, of course, and many American Jews have long had an affinity for Chinese food for several reasons, particularly because it's faux-Kosher and even shares some subtle culinary similarities with traditional Eastern European dishes. Of course, you don't have to be Jewish to enjoy some delicious, inauthentic General Tso's chicken when other folks are digging into their Christmas hams. No matter what the numbers say, you can't deny that Chinese food on Christmas is awesome.
And now that The Interview is back in theaters, the second half of your alternative Christmas tradition is set.