There are 40 shopping days left until Christmas, but many Upper Valley retailers fear it could be a long, dark night.
With the coronavirus pandemic surging to new levels, retail shops that rely on the Thanksgiving-to-New Year’s holiday period for the bulk of their annual profits are looking at a potentially downbeat end to an already difficult year.
“I don’t expect December to be a normal December, and I don’t think anybody here does,” said Jeffrey Kahn, who has run his eclectic gift shop, Unicorn, in the heart of Woodstock Village for 42 years and worked nearly as many Christmas seasons as Santa Claus. “Things are not heading in a good direction right now.”
Christmas and Woodstock go together like fruit cake and unwanted holiday gifts: The picture-postcard town draws thousands of visitors from across the Northeast every year in mid-December for Woodstock’s annual Wassail Weekend celebration, which fills area hotels with guests and Central Street stores with customers.
But this year, as Vermont’s required 14-day quarantine for out-of-state visitors makes tourism a tough sell, the town has redesigned the event to target only in-state residents. The event will also, for the first time, be spread over two Saturdays, Dec. 5 and Dec. 12, in order to both hold down the number of people visiting the town on a single day and to increase opportunities for visitors to come.
Gone are the traditional parade, bonfire and house tours. To accommodate social distancing, they have been replaced with a “virtual parade” of residents dressed in period attire that will be uploaded to the High Horses Therapeutic Riding website, a door decoration contest, a scavenger hunt and other outdoor celebrations.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” said Beth Finlayson, the executive director of the Woodstock Area Chamber of Commerce, which organizes Wassail Weekend. “Retail stores want and need people here for business, but some community members are worried about people coming into town.”
A wedding this past summer at the Woodstock Inn & Resort when many of the attendees removed their face masks set off alarm bells around town.
“We hope we’ve come up with a good plan to keep people safe,” Finlayson said.
Kim Smith last week was prepping her apparel store 37 Central Clothiers with Christmas decorations — a small Christmas tree on a table at the front of the store is adorned with face masks that have the words “nice” and “naughty” printed on them. Smith, who also owns the Red Wagon Toy Co. next door, said she got an early start on the front window displays this year.
“Usually we do them just prior to Thanksgiving but this year we feel we need to get into the spirit right now,” she said.
The pandemic has depressed sales 20% this year at 37 Central’s Woodstock store and 40% at its location in Hanover. The latter has been hurt more by the absence of about half of Dartmouth students, plus the cancellation of college events such as graduation, sports and parents weekend that draw visitors to town.
“For us, foliage season and the holiday is what gets us through the year,” Smith said about a typical, pre-COVID-19 business cycle. “I’m not sure what the holidays are going to look like, but foliage was exceptional for us. We did the same numbers we did last October, which was astounding given we could only have 10 people in the store at a time.”
Smith said although all stores in Woodstock have been seeing lower sales, merchants nonetheless have had a cushion under them by the large percentage of second-home owners in Woodstock who relocated to their seasonal residences because of the pandemic and because of in-state residents who have been coming to town on day excursions.
And she speculated that retail stores like hers, surprisingly, might benefit this season as online shoppers become frustrated over backlogs and delays in shipping caused by overloaded carriers flooded with holiday packages.
“UPS and FedEx are going to be really backed up. That could be good for us,” Smith said. “We have it right on hand, you don’t have to wait for it. No shipping charges.”
By one important measure — bookings at the 142-room Woodstock Inn & Resort — there is already evidence that there will be fewer holiday travelers this season to Woodstock, making it tougher for the town’s tourist-dependent merchants.
The inn is typically booked solid around the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, said Courtney Lowe, the inn’s vice president of marketing and business development. This year, the four-day Thanksgiving weekend is instead “looking like a midweek occupancy” and the week between Christmas and New Year’s, which the inn would normally “be filling in now,” is seeing a “stall in reservations.”
That situation will only become harder under Vermont’s restrictive new guidelines for visitors traveling to the state.
“You can’t get here from there,” Lowe said.
Like Smith, Kari Meutsch and her husband, Kristian Preylowski, co-owners of The Yankee Bookshop, said they are looking to the support from customers in the community — both year-round and seasonal — to help get them through what could be a difficult holiday and winter season.
Meutsch said the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas period usually accounts for 25% of the book store’s annual sales but that she’s noticed “with a third wave on the horizon we have a lot more people coming in for their holiday shopping.” (Bestsellers have been Fredrik Backman’s novel Anxious People and the nonfiction Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson.)
During October, when Woodstock saw an influx of visitors during peak foliage, Meutsch said there were Saturdays when the store reached its maximum 15-person capacity and “we had to have someone at the door” to regulate entrants.
She said customers from around the country who had a connection to the Woodstock area, either through a seasonal home or even on the recommendation of someone they knew, helped to boost online sales from “maybe to one to two books a month” before the pandemic to “one or two per day now.”
“We are hoping our holiday season will extend so it will be all of November and December instead of just those four weeks,” Meutsch said. “A lot of it is a ‘Who knows?’ situation. We just got to be ready for anything.”
Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.
