$890 average holiday spend: three category clips, not one sale clip

NRF's winter holiday FAQ, which reports its 2025 survey, says consumers planned to spend $890 per person on holiday gifts, food, decorations and other seasonal items, the second-highest figure in the survey's 23-year history. That one figure covers four kinds of purchase, so a single sale clip speaks to none of them well. A shop can cut three category clips from one recording for $0.06 in trims and caption each for $0.20, $0.66 in all.

What the figure covers

The $890 is an average across everything the survey counts. It is not a figure for gifts alone, and it says nothing about your category's share. Use it to decide that the audience is thinking across categories, then pick the one you sell.

Cut by category

Record one 90-second walk through the shop, then cut three clips with video trim: the gift table, the decoration wall and the food counter. Each clip is 8 to 10 seconds and carries one price point or bundle written as a caption card.

If you sell in only one category, make three clips within it, by price tier, rather than inventing categories you do not stock.

• Gifts: one item and a price on a card.
• Decorations: a set and what is in it.
• Food: a box or basket and the order cut-off date.

Caption and join

Burn each card with video captions and cues, $0.20 per job. For an ad that covers the whole shop, join the three trims in Timeline 1.0 in silence mode and caption the joined file once instead, which is cheaper per second of screen time than three separate caption jobs.

What the average cannot tell you

An average hides a wide spread. Some households spend a fraction of $890 and some far more, so do not caption the number as if it were your customer's budget. Write your own prices, and let the clip carry them.

The 3.7% to 4.2% growth forecast applies to total retail sales in November and December, not to any one store. It describes the market, so it should not appear in a caption as a promise.

Before you publish

Sume tools read media from your workspace, so import the recording first with POST /v1/media-imports and use the returned media.sume.com URL as the trim source. A trim needs start plus exactly one of end or duration, and precision defaults to exact, which lands on the frame you wrote down.

Captions with cues take your text with start and end seconds and skip speech-to-text, so a clip with no speech never hits caption_no_speech. A caption job covers a video up to 60 seconds, which is why each clip here stays well under that. If you need the same words on a second clip or a different layout, pass source_caption_id to restyle an earlier caption job rather than paying for another speech-to-text pass; for authored cues, a second job at $0.20 is the simple route.

Cite the NRF figure as the 2025 survey result, with its page and date; the survey is last year's, so check for a 2026 update before you publish. A number that was right in one season should not stay on a product page into the next.