It is a long and winding road to the opening of our year-round holiday store Traditions….but a fun one! Gary and Barbara Thomas loved the holidays, especially Christmas. One of our first memories of Christmas morning is Dad, at the crack of dawn, turning on the Ray Coniff singer’s Christmas CD, indicating it was time for all of us to get out of bed and see what Santa had brought……..trust me we didn’t need the melody of White Christmas blaring to tell us that. Still, even at that age we knew it was important to humor Dad! Family vacations also concentrated on finding the best local bakery and Christmas store in the towns we would travel to all over the western United States. Often, Dad and Mom would see an item they thought they could make themselves in our travels, so when we got home, they started trying to replicate it. Dad’s home workshop soon became Santa’s workshop, and then Dad had the brilliant idea that maybe we should start selling Christmas in his Grocery store called Gary’s Market. So, away went the paper goods aisle in mid-November, and out came the Christmas product. That wasn’t enough however, the entire store was decorated from ceiling to floor, my brothers were in charge of stringing the lights and ceiling decor and Mom and I would decorate the other departments of the market. Our customers LOVED IT! That first year, we sold out in a few weeks, way before Christmas! So a “tradition” was born, and we continued doing that in the market until 1994 when I got sick with Asthma and Lupus, and my doctors asked me to slow down and stop catering so much (I owned my own Catering company). Dad, always ready to expand our business, decided that we would take the vacant store in his strip mall and open a Christmas store.