Ringing in the new year offers an opportunity for self-assessment. How am I doing? How’s my family? What are my goals and ambitions? Where am I in the big picture of life? All of that leads to new year’s resolutions.

It’s also an opportunity for an accounting of who we are as a nation — including both the serious and the less important aspects. Consider:

There are more cats (82 million) than dogs (72 million) in the United States — though there are more households with dogs (43 million) than there are with cats (38 million).

Only in West Virginia have more people died than have been born since 2000.

The most popular form of cosmetic surgery in the United States is liposuction (457,000 procedures in 2007), followed by breast augmentation (399,000) and tummy tucks (185,000).

These facts and more come from what became my personal bible for holiday chit-chat — the small talk that seasonal get-togethers invariably force upon us each year. It’s called The Statistical Abstract of the United States. It’s a perfect primer for the New Year’s Eve bash with people you haven’t seen since, well, last New Year’s Eve. And the best part is that it’s updated annually, so you’ll never be caught using the same material twice.

Lars Johanson, chief of the Statistical Abstract Section of the Census Bureau, recently explained the history of the Statistical Abstract:

“The book goes back to the late 1800s, when it was first published,” he told me. “It actually predates the Census Bureau as a permanent agency.

“The idea was at one time to put together basically a lot of economic facts to help the U.S. government and businesses do economic planning, but has since spanned out to cover a lot of other subjects — covering anything from pet ownership to how many people do a barbecue every year to how many people live in particular cities, and many other facts.”

For example, this year’s version reports that Mexico accounts for the most foreigners traveling to the United States for pleasure. Next on the list? The United Kingdom, followed by Japan.

Who knew that Burma claims the highest number of individuals granted asylum in the United States?

Or that, in 2005, more abortions per capita were performed in New York (38 per 1,000 females between 15 and 44 years old) than in any other state. New Jersey had the second-highest rate, and Maryland ranked third. The lowest per-capita rate? Wyoming.

Perhaps there’s a relationship between those data and this: The National Center for Health Statistics reports that 57 percent of teenage girls say they engaged in sexual contact within the last year. I’m thinking those teenage girls grow up and settle in Vegas. After all, of the country’s 50 largest metropolitan areas, Las Vegas had the greatest population growth between 2000 and 2007 (33.5 percent).

The Statistical Abstract can also keep the sports enthusiast amused. It says football is the most popular organized sport among high school boys. Basketball and track and field round out the top three. High school girls are playing basketball more than anything else. Track and field and volleyball — yes, volleyball — follow.

On a broader scale, Americans are more likely to play baseball at least once a year than to kick around a soccer ball, but the disparity is relatively small. And there are more hikers than baseball and soccer players combined.

Speaking of baseball, the average major-league salary was $1,896,000 in 2000. By 2007, it had risen to $2,825,000. (World Series MVP Cole Hamels made $500,000 in 2008.)

With the economy now in the tank, it’s interesting to note that lottery sales increased from $52 billion to almost $53 billion from 2006 to 2007. Everyone’s looking for the instant fix — so much so that we can’t even wait for the evening Powerball drawing: Scratch-off tickets account for more than half of those lottery sales ($30 billion).

Retailers might be singing the blues now, but they had been on a roll for years. Americans are projected to have forked over more than $147 billion in online retail spending in 2008. The figure was about $31 billion in 2001.

Much of that growth was driven by a 62 percent increase in spending on Internet advertising between 2000 and 2007. Meanwhile, spending on open-air ads — such as on billboards, buses and bus shelters — increased 39 percent. But the largest jump came on the tube: Cable-television ad expenditures increased 70 percent over the last seven years.

We’re still looking for ways to entertain ourselves, too. Box-office receipts were $9.6 billion in 2007. And Americans spent more than $90 billion on sporting goods that year, an increase of 0.3 percent from the previous year — the smallest since 2001.

That’s just an infinitesimal sampling of the information recorded this year in the Statistical Abstract.

By the way, these tidbits can serve you well beyond these holidays. Come July Fourth, you’ll want to impress your neighbors by noting that 35 percent of Americans barbecued at least once in the last 12 months.

— Michael Smerconish writes a weekly column for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Readers may contact him via the Web at http://www.mastalk.com.