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Christmas lights around Brown County in from last year. The Brown County Christkindl Market and Salvation Army’s Christmas Light Parade are great ways to kickoff the holiday season in town!
The Christmas season in Brown County is nearly underway! Merchants have been busy decorating their shops and preparing for the lighting of the Christmas tree, music, dancing and a lot of holiday shopping.
After the hectic October season, tourism in Brown County begins to taper off a bit. However, the many Christmas events in town draw more people from Thanksgiving until Christmas.
Richard Wills, the owner of Bali Makasih-Island Imports with his wife Anak Agung Setiawati, said usually a few weeks after the Chocolate Walk, shopping in town starts to go down a few notches and then, after Christmas break is over, it dramatically slows down.
“If the weather is decent on the weekend you’ll see people in town, but the problem is people aren’t booking rooms those weekends,” said Wills. “They’re just driving down for the day, so we still don’t have big crowds.”
He said around Valentine’s Day, there are more crowds because they’re booking rooms again, but until the weather’s nice it’s still just local people driving down, not people planning vacations because they don’t know what the weather will be like.
However, Wills said they keep their store open during the winter and later into the day than most other shops in town.
“I’m usually the first one open and last one to close,” said Wills. “By the time I leave, everyone’s already shut down.”
He said in the past they’ve always done really well even up to the end of the year, but this year not so much.
“People seem to be done earlier this year,” said Wills. “In the past, you could stay open until 9 p.m. and still get people in here, but this year it didn’t really feel that way.”
Jennifer Bonney, an employee for Foxfire Boutique for the last four years, said while their store stays open year-round and stays pretty consistent, she gets a lot of shoppers who come in upset because stores are already closed.
“A lot of people come to town in January or February and are upset because everything else is closed in town,” said Bonney. “I think they’re frustrated and it seems lately that a lot of places are closed on Monday and Tuesday even during the busy seasons. And that’s frustrating because people will come in on those days and think everything is open and it’s not.”
Bonney said Christmas shopping is the last big thing in the winter and after that’s over business goes down until spring. She said people come in and say they tried to go here or there and no one’s open or there’s no one in town.
Bonney said that the concerts in town have helped and increasing the promotion of the town could bring in more people during the slower months.
Wills said he believes they could really see more foot traffic and have more people come in to stay if the town got everyone involved and decorated more for the holidays.
“I truly believe if they decorated this town for Christmas like really, really decorated all the streets, trees, buildings, I honestly think you might be surprised,” said Wills. “Let the shop owners chip in and let the town with their bucket trucks go around on the trees and decorate them. And then let everyone stay open later. Put in an ice skating rink and put Santa out there. I know it would be hard at the beginning, but it would be worth it.”
