Spirit Halloween’s Christmas stores are taking over spaces once occupied by Christmas Tree Shops

In many of these locations, Spirit Halloween is filling a void left by Christmas Tree Shops. The Massachusetts-based chain, which sold home decor and holiday decorations year-round, closed all its remaining stores after filing for bankruptcy last year and defaulting on a $45 million loan. Christmas Tree Shops had 82 stores when it filed for bankruptcy, per Reuters.

While it is unclear whether this was intentional, many of the Spirit Christmas stores will enter former Christmas Tree Shops, such as in the Faunce Corner Shopping Center in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, and Consumer Square in Mays Landing, New Jersey. Others are in shopping centers that previously housed Christmas Tree Shops or former locations of Bed Bath & Beyond, which had owned Christmas Tree Shops. A spokesperson for Spirit did not respond to questions about whether or not the Spirit Christmas rollout is related to the Christmas Tree Shops closures.

The pop-up stores will sell holiday decor, apparel, inflatables, gifts and stocking stuffers. They will also host meet-and-greets with Santa and a gingerbread village display. Most of the locations will open in early November.

“Spirit Christmas is a new concept for us, and we’re hopeful it will resonate with our customers. Our goal is to create a festive retail experience that captures the spirit of the season, much like we do for Halloween,” a spokesperson said in a statement. While the company calls this a new concept, CoStar News reported Spirit previously attempted Christmas store concepts in 1990, 2005 and 2006.

Spirit Halloween opened 1,525 Halloween pop-up stores this year, often in dead storefronts that were left vacant after previous tenants like Big Lots or Bed Bath & Beyond went bankrupt. If expanded in future years, the Christmas pop-ups could be good news for landlords of spaces that would otherwise be vacant. Some, but not all, of the spaces announced as future Christmas stores currently house Spirit Halloween stores and will transition in the holidays; others are new locations. Spirit had been leasing the former Bed Bath & Beyond location in Poughkeepsie, New York, for a few years and asked to extend its lease for a couple of months, Jim Lavelle, a vp for the property’s owner, Widewaters Group, said in a voicemail message.

Tim McNamara, a broker who represents retailers in New England and eastern New York — but was not involved in the Spirit Christmas transactions — said that while some people in the area may have liked the Christmas Tree Shops brand, it didn’t have anything they couldn’t buy at a Target, a drug store, a crafts store or online. So with Spirit being only a seasonal pop-up store, it may serve a different purpose to landlords and customers.

“It occupies some space, it pays the taxes, it gives [landlords] some rent, it gives them some vitality to their vacant space in their shopping center at a time of year when more people are probably shopping at a shopping center than they do the rest of the year,” McNamara said.

Neil Saunders, managing director of consulting firm GlobalData Retail, said that while the name Christmas Tree Shops made it sound like a dedicated Christmas store, it also would sell a “mish-mash range” of board games, homewares and personal care products. He said Spirit Halloween, however, does a good job every year at focusing on its one specific occasion, and that the pop-up Christmas stores won’t have to worry about having products to sell year-round like Christmas Tree Shops did.

“If Spirit Halloween runs Spirit Christmas in the same way, they’ll probably be pretty good stores; they’ll make them quite engaging, quite entertaining,” Saunders said. “A lot of the way in which [Christmas Tree Shops] displayed merchandise was pretty awful. I mean, they would just chuck things in wire baskets and wire shelving. It wasn’t an inspirational store.”

Still, Saunders said Spirit could struggle to find its place in the Christmas market, as people don’t buy new costumes or decor each year like they would for Halloween. And Spirit doesn’t yet have ownership over the Christmas market like it does for Halloween. “Everyone is in that market in a way that they’re perhaps not with Halloween,” Saunders said. “[Spirit] traditionally hasn’t done it, so it is a lot more challenging.”