The Christmas Shop

by Alex J Allen

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We're getting near to that time again. I don't mean Christmas in general, the whole 'it gets earlier and earlier every year!' thing has been done to death, we know, soon there will be Christmas trees in June, fine. What I'm talking about are those little Christmas shops that appear around now, selling nothing but Christmas items. There's a fairly standard way one of these is created. To make an small, bespoke shop, first, you need to lease a run down looking building in the rough end of town. You should be able to see an Iceland or a Bakers Oven out of the window if you're in the right place. Then you need to come up with a catchy name. To do that you need to pick a name of two different hats. The first hat contains words like 'Christmas', 'holiday' and 'yule'. The second hat has words more like 'land', 'zone', 'O-rama' and 'paradise'. You can pretty much put any word from the first hat together when any word from the second to form a pretty decent Christmas shop name. Holiday land, yule o-rama, it's really all good. Then you need to fill it with cheap stock you've obviously stolen / found somewhere, and cut as many corners as possible. No shelving, just stock lying on the floor in boxes everywhere, keep it casual.
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What I don't really understand, is how these people survive. There are 42 weeks of the year when their trade is totally redundant, and it's not as if these people dispute that, they come in Novemeber and leave in January, they understand that any time outside this period they have no real purpose. At the same time, these people aren't the squirrels of the retail industry, I'm sure they don't make enough money in this two month window to hoard for the rest of the year. Generally, I'll spend, at most, £3 on advent calendars, tinsel and the rest of it. Sure, there's always that one slightly odd pensioner who likes to make a massive deal out of Christmas, turns their house in to Disneyland three months before the day actually arrives and buys that ludicrously inappropriate, overpriced inflatable snowman that's in the window for £70 to wave around on the roof of their house and take a large chunk out of the valuation of their neighbours houses. But still, they can't be rolling in it, can they? There are other seasonal shops that don't have any long term future, calendar shops, for example. At least Christmas stock doesn't go out of style, it's pretty much the same deal every year. Calendar shops become totally redundant as soon as people start singing Auld Lang Sine, you might as well just burn all your stock! Unless you take an unlikely punt on it somehow becomming 2006 again in the near future. Wherever these brave shop keepers go for the rest of the year, I salute them. They keep my Christmas tree tinselled, my presents wrapped and my house generally covered in what my girlfriend just described as 'tat'.