Saturday Gift Post--Thanksgiving Stuff.

It's coming to the last few days of Halloween and that means we have to have the next holiday staged in the store. Anne is actually putting up our first Christmas stuff display for the season (excluding boxed cards, which have been out already). Don't worry, we're not decorating or anything, but we do find that with everyone else putting out stuff earlier and earlier, the budget could be exhausted with a lot of our customers before they see our stuff.

But of course in between Halloween and Christmas is Thanksgiving, and while it's not an enormous gift-giving holiday, there's a bit of interesting stuff, especially for tabletop decor and gifts for the folks hosting the celebration. We sold out of the crow tealight holders on the Halloween table, so I'm hoping that these similar turkey-themed ones from Tag will also sell through.

We're consolidating the Thanksgiving merchandise with the fall forest items that were towards the back of the store. Early sellers were anything with a fox or raccoon on it. We also had animal themed dishtowels that completely sold through, and we're almost out of "foxy fall" napkins. I spent some time on the phone for a customer trying to figure out if somebody else was stocking them. Once again, I've now got a similar design with the added turkeys to signify Thanksgiving.

These corn cob candles have been in the Tag catalog for years, so they must continue to do well. We've already sold a couple. Good thing I didn't bring in the apple collection this year. Apparently harvests in this area have been down 90%. Sigh. We also brought in some fall-hued glass bottles. And we have some slate coasters with wheat and turkey motifs.

And finally, there are a few books that are appropriate for the table. Cozy mystery series that focus on food or holidays eventually get around to a Thanksgiving setting. They are usually paperback originals, but not always. There's Isis Crawford's A Catered Thanksgiving (Kensington), for example, where the killer is hiding a cornucopia of secrets.

And then there's often a cookbook. In Thanksgiving: How to Cook it Well (Random House), former New York Times restaurant critic offers his take. Christopher Kimball and Gabrielle Hamilton both over praise. From the former: "The charm of Sam Sifton’s Thanksgiving is that he proposes that home cooks treat this culinary Olympics like any other dinner party-—don’t panic, deconstruct your tasks into bite-size pieces, and conquer that fear of failure."