Rebecca Haden
A Plus Educational, Harrison, AR
The holidays are approaching, and retailers in our industry face the annual uncertainty about how we should approach the holidays. Where many stores are piling Halloween decorations high in the prime selling space with Christmas and Thanksgiving already festooning the side aisles, parent-teacher stores have to bring out crystal balls to make ordering decisions.
Will this be one of those years when school administrators forbid all holiday decorations, or one of those when dozens of teachers boldly put up Nativity bulletin boards? Will anyone bother to decorate for Thanksgiving this year, or will they go directly from autumn harvest to mittens? Will these be one of those years when we have to reorder dreidels twice, or one of those when we pack away the entire first order in January?
Halloween is a highly controversial holiday in some neighborhoods. While churches in our area usually had Halloween celebrations up through the first half of the 20th century, some Christian families now consider it a pagan or even satanic celebration, and do not want their kids involved in any observation of it in the classroom.
There are also Wiccan and pagan parents who claim it as a religious holiday. This side of the controversy hasn’t come up in our region yet, but in other parts of the country, there are objections to the secular — and some would say inaccurate — celebrations that are usual in schools.
Thanksgiving isn’t so controversial, but some schools shut down for the entire week and some teachers don’t feel it’s worth the bother of decorating for such a brief celebratory season, especially when the malls will start playing “The Little Drummer Boy” before the Trick or Treaters leave the building.
Christmas waxes and wanes in classroom popularity, some years creating a major focal point for lessons as well as decorating, and some years getting tucked discreetly in among the “winter holidays.”
How can we avoid either running out of holiday merchandise or having to put too much on clearance at the end of the season?
We can go ahead and celebrate. These are American holidays, after all, and many have been celebrated as secular festivals for centuries. We can boldly bring in all the most fun holiday stuff, celebrate unabashedly ourselves, and hope our pleasure in any and all the celebrations carries over into sales.
This is my favorite option, because I like a good party, and as an American I feel that I can take part in all of them out of appreciation for my nation’s diversity.
I remember one year selling a Christmas stocking kit to a grandmother.
“Is one enough?” I asked her, seeing how excited she was about making it with her grandchild.
She frowned in thought for a moment. “Probably,” she decided, “since we’re Jewish.”
Being prepared to share everyone’s pleasure may be more respectful of diversity than eschewing all the holidays.
We can also finesse it.
Instead of “Happy Halloween” items in the Halloween display, put all the materials on the skeletal system, pumpkins, and bats. Orange and black paper draw it all together, and if this is a year when our customers are skipping Halloween, we can put it all back into the science section on All Saint’s Day without making any fuss about it.
For Thanksgiving, use Stone Soup, materials on Native Americans and Colonial America, and things about families. Tuck leftovers back into the social studies section in December. We can make a wintry display with blue and white that will be comfortable for both Hanukah and Christmas, or use red and green and forest scenes to evoke a noncommittal Christmas feeling and still be ready for a quick change in time for Kwanzaa.
A crystal ball and plenty of colors of paper and ribbon, that’s what it takes.
