Dear Reader, after extensive gathering of data and painstakingly summarizing the resulting conclusions, the following deductions have been found to be mostly true:

During the next seven days…

…5,617,128 fruitcakes will be made in America. Eleven will be eaten. Partially.

…6,598,411 nephews and nieces will be told, “Look how much you’ve grown.”

…4,218 Christmas trees will fall over. Of those, 14 will not be picked back up.

…93,712 gifts that were wrapped and presented to someone last Christmas will be wrapped and presented to someone again this year.

…8,942,617 credit cards will be maxed out. Of those, about 34 percent will be paid off by Christmas of 2018. The rest will never be paid off.

…33,618,435 husbands will just start to realize Christmas is seven days away and will begin to think of what to buy their wives. Ninety-four percent will think, “I still have 6 more days.”

…44,423,219 children will actually hear reindeer on the rooftop. The rest of the United States population, about 86 percent, has lost their capacity to hear such things.

…72 million cats will receive presents. Sixty-nine million husbands will receive presents.

…9,654,312 diagram and assembly instructions will be balled up and tossed into the trash, having never been read. Of those, 8,983,211 will be retrieved back out of the trash within two hours.

…238 different versions of “Jingle Bells” will be played.

…124,985,234 cups of eggnog will be consumed. Approximately 77 percent will have other ingredients added.

…12,654,690 readings of Luke 2:1-14 will be read. Eighty-three percent will mispronounce the name “Quirinius.”

…1 infant, reportedly unlike all other infants in the history of the human race, will be honored.

REX ALPHIN of Walters is a farmer, businessman, author, county supervisor and contributing columnist for The Tidewater News. His email address is rexalphin@aol.com.