We asked, when do you start the Christmas season in your store?

Policy for us is to begin fall items about a week before Halloween. This way we are not participating as much in the Halloween holiday, but have plenty available for Thanksgiving. Our focus tends to be on Thanksgiving since we are “Harvest” bookstore, and we are thankful as Christians for what the Lord has done over the course of the year.

Our annual Open House then features harvest/fall items the Sunday before Thanksgiving and continues through the week of Thanksgiving to clear out the fall items. People love to come in last minute and get hostess gifts before they leave for the holiday. Fall decorations and displays in the store are marked to sell, or we use them as door prizes for the open house, thus eliminating storage.

Christmas decorations go up at the same time the church decorations do. We also tag them for sale and help the church purchase theirs by utilizing our wholesale discounts. We introduce Christmas at the same time as the Harvest Open House and begin discounting Christmas the following week at 10% off. The key is to not over-buy.

Our items then tend to be new and fresh when other retailers have had theirs out for six to eight weeks prior—people are ready for something they haven’t been looking at for a month. Talking to sales reps helps us know whether we are picking the same items as other stores in the area or not. We are intentionally different.

Lorena Allen

 Manager

Harvest Bookstore

Eastview Christian Church

Normal, Ill.

I tried it all … the first of October, the week before Thanksgiving and several weeks in between. Being in a church, it is easy to come off as “too commercial” if you put this Christian holiday on display too early. The timing I finally settled with was the week after Halloween. Our church had a Fall Festival, and when that was over, our congregation seemed comfortable with having Christmas on display.

Geni Hulsey

President

Church Bookstore Network

Houston

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