If You're Ordering Takeout on Christmas and Christmas Eve, It's Probably Chinese Food

Do Americans really order Chinese takeout en masse over the Christmas holiday? Slate collected data from popular delivery service GrubHub, which has more than 30,000 restaurants in its network, to see if Chinese takeout restaurants experience a bump in orders on December 24 and 25. According to GrubHub's numbers — which reveal the proportion of total sales on any given day — takeout customers definitely ordered Chinese food more often than any other option. On Christmas Day last year, "the percentage of all orders that were for Chinese food increased by 152 percent," while other cuisines all suffered 30-percent hits as a result. (Mexican food, pizza, and "American" food saw their worst days on Christmas.)

GrubHub users apparently tend to favor Asian food over the Christmas holiday: Vietnamese takeout also saw its largest proportional increase of the year fall on December 25. Christmas Eve 2013 also saw an increase in Chinese food orders, proportionally, with a 50 percent bump. But while Chinese food emerges at the top of the takeout heap during Christmas, a GrubHub representative points that orders in general are down on Christmas Day: Apparently, many folks do cook their own Christmas dinners.