It's that time of year when we all like a little bit of festivity in our lives. And us mappers are no different from the rest of you, so we decided to have a little bit of Xmas fun with some data that was lying around the office.

Our mini project was inspired by Ordnance Survey who had been tweeting some Christmassy places they had found on the map. For example:

• Christmas Hill
• Turkey Island
• Sledge Green

You get the picture. So we did a little bit of searching and discovered nearly 3000 places on the map with a Christmassy name. Who knew we were such a festive isle!

This is the list we used:-

ivy |holly | fairy | mistletoe | snow | jingle | bells | 
sleigh | stocking | present | pudding | turkey | cracker | 
rudolf | tinsel | bauble | chestnut | stuffing | sprouts | 
christmas | star | celebration | candle | jolly | noel | 
angel | carol | festive | gift | jingle | manger | 
decoration | yule

I'm sure you can think of a few more but that's a decent list to create a map with. We can tell you now that we like our Chestnut and Holly as these both threw up loads of matches.  But our favourite by a long way was Jolly Farmers Lane because it means everyone that lives there has a real reputation to live up to. It also made us wonder just who did live there to give it that name?

So a map of Christmassy places is pretty good, but we could see clusters appearing and it got us pondering further. Who lives in the most Christmassy county? A few quick flicks of the SQL wand and we had the answer, are you ready? The answer is Greater London with a whopping 159. The top of the table looks like this:-

What a festive lot the Yorkshire folk are, whilst down the bottom we have the Scots who clearly don't give a fig about Christmas. Or it could be that they are lacking in population and towns, we'll let you decide.

So as we dive into the festive season we'll leave you with a little map we made where you can find out just how Christmassy your own county is.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all of us at Nautoguide!