Christmas shopping frenzy to kick off later due to Covid-19

While Christmas 2020 has not been cancelled – at least not yet – Covid-19 has significantly curtailed the festive spending season in two of Dublin’s leading department stores.

For the first time in more than a decade, Brown Thomas held off on opening its Christmas Shop in August, with a spokeswoman saying its halls – or at least its Grafton Street top floor – will not now be decked with boughs of holly until the middle of September.

The season to be jolly will start even later on the north side of the Liffey, with Arnotts having decided to delay its Christmas Shop opening until the start of October, as the country continues to grapple with an unprecedented public health crisis which has significantly tempered the appetite for spending on frivolity in bricks and mortar shops.

The absence of the ho-ho-hos at arguably the least wonderful time of the year should silence the chorus of no-no-nos traditionally heard towards the end of summer as people take to social media platforms to give out about the department stores selling snow globes and winter baubles while the country bakes in late summer sun.

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Disapproval

Every year, as the chorus of disapproval about Christmas shops sitting cheek by jowl with the back-to-school goods and picnic items has grown louder, the retailers have stood their ground, pointing out that they are merely responding to demand and are not actually forcing consumers to buy fake plastic fir trees or Advent calendars.

While Christmas shopping will come late to Ireland, it has been a different story across the water. In the UK a spike in interest in Christmas in the time of coronavirus has seen some retailers moving earlier than normal.

John Lewis opened its online Christmas shop last week, saying searches for festive products had nearly quadrupled when compared with 2019. It suggested that shoppers, tired of lockdown, had moved on in their minds to musing about how they might to decorate their homes come December.