Holiday Hazards (2020-2024)
A Dashboard Full of Bad Decisions
If there’s one thing that American TV does consistently, it’s remind you that holidays are a danger zone. Every Christmas episode has someone falling off a ladder while hanging lights. Thanksgiving? Someone is definitely chopping off a finger trying to carve a turkey. And the Fourth of July? Fireworks injuries are practically a genre of their own.
Naturally, I got curious. Is it really that bad? Is this just TV exaggeration, or do holidays actually send people to the ER in droves? I had to know.
How I Built This Mess
The dataset comes from the NEISS database, which tracks product-related injuries treated in US emergency rooms. Super detailed. Super chaotic. Exactly my vibe.
But the data wasn’t exactly dashboard-ready. I had to roll up my sleeves in Alteryx first. Clean it. Reshape it.
I built fact and dimension tables. A whole star schema situation. And create a Holiday Flag because, believe it or not, holidays are not an official column.
It was one of those builds where you start thinking this will be quick and… it was. But I still had to go back to the select tool a few times because I kept forgetting to make sure all data types were consistent across all tables to be able to create the relationships in Tableau. Sadly, this mistake is not new to me (see Types of People, Types of Data for context).
About the Dashboard (The Risky Design Choices)
I could have done a safe dashboard. A bar chart. A pie chart. Maybe a treemap if I was feeling crazy (just kidding, I would never use a treemap). But no.
I decided to go full risk-on.
A vertical timeline layout.
A background image that I built outside of Tableau because Tableau does not play nice with background images unless you float them everywhere and ruin your soul.
Floating containers layered perfectly on top of the design.
A ridiculous amount of color coding per holiday. If I was going to commit, I was going to commit.
Each holiday on the timeline has button that launches you into its own detailed dashboard with way more data than any sane person should explore about injuries on Thanksgiving or Valentine’s Day.
What Will You Find
Some of the top causes of holiday injuries are not what you would expect. Some patterns made me laugh. Some made me deeply concerned for humanity.
But I am not going to spoil it here. You will have to explore the dashboard yourself if you want to know which common household object is secretly plotting against you during Christmas.
No, seriously, go. I did not spend hours fighting with floating containers for you not to click.
