The Magi gave Jesus gold, signifying His kingship, frankincense, signifying His priesthood, and myrrh, signifying the death He would one day submit to (Matthew 2:11). At the time they gave their gifts to Jesus, did they know He would one day die an unusual death? Did they know the Old Testament prophecies about the Mes...

The percentage of Americans who believe there is a war on Christmas is down from 39 percent in December 2022 to just 23 percent in December 2024. This effect is seen consistently across political perspectives. Glad we solved that one. Perhaps this means it's time for us to reverse the cessation of civil liberties enact...

A new study published in Nature Energy found that electric vehicle batteries lasted as much as a third longer in the real world than they did in initial expectations from laboratory simulations, arguing that the controlled conditions of lab analysis are actually much rougher on batteries than drivers are. Compared to t...

Coca-Cola announced that it will fail its sustainability goals and is giving up on its intention to recycle the equivalent of 100 percent of its packaging by 2030. In 2023, 47.7 percent of Coke's packaging was plastic, 26 percent was aluminum, and 10.4 percent was glass, and it has decided that rather than try to hit i...

Sales of Christmas trees are holding steady, with 14 percent of households buying a live tree last year while 80 percent of Americans have an artificial tree. There are 2,880 farms dedicated to solely growing Christmas trees, and then 13,000 that dabble in the business and sell a few alongside other, more traditional c...

When it comes to picking a favorite Christmas movie my criteria relegates "good" or "funny" to the after thought pile. This is about Christmas not comedy. I need it to be about Christmas, the spirit of Christmas. Not a funny Christmas like National Lampoons or "you'll shoot your eye out" f...

European workers take a lot of sick days, and absences are at the highest level seen in 15 years. Across wealthy countries, the average number of sick days taken by workers comes in at 14 days per year, or just shy of three workweeks out sick. In Norway, the average worker took 27.5 sick days per year, essentially spen...

The annual revenue of ringtone sales peaked at $1.6 billion in 2007, adjusted for inflation. That essentially came out of nowhere, and truth be told evaporated within just a few years, a multibillion-dollar blip, when ringtones accounted for more of the music business's revenue than digital albums or single downloads d...

Instead of one Thanksgiving Day, consider living a thanksgiving life. There are an infinite number of reasons to give thanks to God. As you sit before the Lord today, think of those personal, intimate reasons you have to give thanks to the Lord-things you might be hesitant to share in a group setting but which you know...

The EPA reports that the real-world fuel economy of new cars improved by 1.1 miles per gallon of gasoline this year, reaching a record high of 27.1 miles per gallon for model year 2023 vehicles. That is vastly higher than the 13.1 miles per gallon first logged in 1975, when fuel economy data first began being measured....

Fast food is in a bad place right now: it's become too expensive for what was once its core consumer looking for a cheap bite on the go, and it's not high enough on the value chain to actually compete with the fast-casual locations like Chipotle or Sweetgreen that they're peers with when it comes to pricing. A survey i...

Every year Americans pay around $126 billion in swipe fees, which are the amounts collected by credit card networks every time one pays by card. Merchants detest them - by now you must have encountered at least one place willing to give a discount for cash - in no small part because they've roughly doubled over the pas...

A new survey found that a majority of TikTok users look at the site for product reviews, with 27 percent of users saying it's a major reason they're on the service. In general, younger people really believe in TikTok for product endorsements - 74 percent say it's a reason they use the social media site, while 40 percen...

Tropicana is redesigning its bottles and also shrinking them a bit, replacing a 52-ounce carafe with a narrow 46-ounce bottle. Orange juice has had a bit of a rough time, with Americans steadily drinking less and less of it every year. Tropicana's sales have declined 19 percent year over year, in no small part due to r...

The puppet Lamb Chop's days as a beloved character for children have generally subsided given that the transformative kids show is long off the air, but the puppet lives on with a new set of fans: dogs. Dogs cannot get enough of Lamb Chop. Chewy, the pet superstore, said that Lamb Chop is the second-most popular dog to...

Lots of the most dangerous roads in America have something in common: They're state-managed roads in municipalities. When municipalities are responsible for roads, they can be proactive and responsive to the desires of the community, so dangerous intersections get addressed and speed limits get toggled until a better i...

What's the best value of #tp? Manufacturers of toilet paper get needlessly clever with equivalences, claiming, for instance, that a sheet is some sort of consistent or fungible unity, and that double- or triple-ply tissue constitutes a savings. Indeed, a "roll" is not even a reliable unit; Charmin's regular r...

By some metrics, we're in a declining age of love songs. Of the 5,100 Billboard Top 10 hits from 1958 to 2023, 1,040 of them could be called "serenades," or songs about love and devotion sung from one person to another. These are indeed in decline, going from 23 percent of hits in the 1960s and up to 27 perce...

Because we've societally completely run out of ideas and are just desperate to string together enough proper nouns you might like in order to sell some cards, Hasbro will release a 111-card game for two to five players where the object is to collect different items to earn points, and they will call it MONOPOLY Deal: H...

Last year consumers in the United States returned $743 billion worth of merchandise, which was 14.5 percent of all the things they bought. That's up, an increase from 10.6 percent in 2020 according to the National Retail Federation. Given that there are costs to a business of returning an unwanted good - including ship...