• Cooking Christmas dinner leaves The UK with a £15,000,000 energy bill
• Christmas tree lights cost £3.75 million a day to leave on

The price of Christmas can run extremely high, with presents, food, festivities and decorations easily reaching into the hundreds for the average family.

One cost which is often forgotten about is the additional gas and electricity used over the festive period to power our parties, dinners and decorations. Gocompare.com Energy conducted research to find out just how much energy the nation uses to power Christmas, from both a cost and an environmental perspective.

The average turkey Christmas dinner takes around five hours of oven time to cook, costing a household around £1.50 to power – that’s 1.5x more than a family’s standard electricity bill for an entire day. This equates to 14,056 metric tonnes of co2 emissions UK wide; enough to fuel a household for a year.

Leaving Christmas lights on can have an impact too; on average, we leave our Christmas trees lit up for around six hours a day, costing British families 37p a day over the festive period for just the Christmas tree. Those who also decorate the outside of their house can be looking at an electricity bill of just under £3 a day. For Christmas tree lights alone, this equates to just over £3.75million in electricity a day across The UK.

More time at home, thanks to an abundance of bank holidays and often extra annual leave, can run up energy bills quickly too. People are usually at home for almost ten days over Christmas between December 22nd and January 2nd, costing a household around £20 in heating and electricity more than if they were at work during this time.

In total, the average UK household could be spending up to £50 extra on gas and electricity in December due to Christmas festivities.

Gocompare.com Energy’s Ben Wilson, said: “Christmas really is a time of joy, so worrying about your energy bill is the last thing most families want to do. There are many ways to reduce your electricity usage without impacting your Christmas, such as switching the Christmas tree lights off when there is no one in the room, or using more energy efficient ways to cook some of the dinner, such as steaming.

“Our research highlights that, while it may not seem a lot per household, the combined impact of increased Christmas energy usage can make a huge difference to the UK’s overall output. Reducing carbon emissions is hugely important in offsetting global warming, so we all have a personal responsibility to do our part and reduce our energy output when possible.”

For advice on how to reduce your energy bill in winter, check out our guide on Gocompare.com here: http://www.gocompare.com/gas-and-electricity/winter-saving-stats/