{"id":27700,"date":"2018-11-13T07:00:06","date_gmt":"2018-11-13T12:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=27700"},"modified":"2018-11-13T07:00:06","modified_gmt":"2018-11-13T12:00:06","slug":"book-kin-and-chrismukkah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=27700","title":{"rendered":"Finding Holiday Spirit Earlier Than Intended"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Our wonderful customer, Anne, begins her holiday gathering by bringing in book reviews, clippings, and interviews.<\/p><\/div>\n

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As a retailer, I’m supposed to deck my halls for the holiday season pretty much the moment the first autumn leaf flutters to the ground. Fourth quarter makes or breaks our year as a business, so it’s vital to attend to “the season.” But as a human being, I\u00a0dislike the relentless consumer madness\u00a0our culture has\u00a0created around the holidays. So I strike compromises at the store, reluctantly setting up a couple of low shelves with holiday books just after Halloween\u2014people start asking for them in August and I’ll bring them out from the back but cannot bring myself to create a display that early\u2014and I\u00a0also relent by\u00a0setting out\u00a0the holiday boxed cards in early November, putting\u00a0two\u00a0shelves of Hanukkah cards in the\u00a0top spots because, even though we don’t sell many, Christmas tends to drown out all the other seasonal holidays, and I’m striving for at least a little equity.\u00a0But there’s one\u00a0thing I do<\/em> love about\u00a0early holiday\u00a0prep, and that’s the influx of aunts, uncles, and grandparents coming in with their lists of family members,\u00a0eager\u00a0to match each reader with the perfect book.
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\nI love the thoughtfulness these relatives bring to their holiday shopping, and it’s an absolute joy to spend time book matchmaking. Some customers live far away, so their lists come by email with tidbits of information about each child and his or her interests. This tradition is twinkling lights and shiny tinsel to me.
\nThe other day, our longtime customer Anne came in to select books for her grandchildren, Emily and Michael.\u00a0She doesn’t just bring in a list; she brings in resources. Clipped together are book reviews from newspapers and magazines and IndieNext catalogs, notes jotted from interviews and media mentions. Anne uses the clippings as a starting point, and\u00a0we dart around, adding possibilities and weighing in when we think an extra year’s wait might introduce Emily or Michael to that book at\u00a0the perfect\u00a0time.\u00a0It’s a joyful and lively discussion. My whole staff is impressed by how informed she is about books, and also how open she is to books she’s never heard of.
\nOnce the final selections are made, Anne adds each child’s book picks to an index card labeled with her grandchildren’s names, the year, and the\u00a0special occasion the books were given for (including half-birthdays; love that). These records\u00a0go back\u00a0to when\u00a0Emily and Michael\u00a0were two years old.\u00a0Anne let me take a photo of as many of those lists as I could fit on the counter, but there were many more:
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\nI love thinking about those lucky kids and their ever-growing libraries of classics old and new, and the grandmother who makes it happen year after year after year. Now that’s holiday magic!
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Grandmothers like this longtime customer make me not resist holiday prep quite so much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27700\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}