The Store Where It’s Christmas…Forever
San Diego’s City Lights Collectibles was only supposed to be open six weeks a year — but as the owners quickly learned, when it comes to collecting yuletide tchotchkes, there are no expiration dates.
By Lara McCaffrey
The only thing missing from this forever-Christmas store are chestnuts roasting on an open fire. (Lara McCaffrey)
Why have Christmas for only one day when you can celebrate it all year round?
That’s the case at City Lights Collectibles, a niche boutique in San Diego, California, located on an industrial cul-de-sac near a brewery and just over two miles away from SeaWorld.
A winter wonderland decked with artificial firs and miniature Christmas displays, the expansive store sells all things yuletide, with Christmas carols purring through its speakers. Various types of people come to City Lights, including curious tourists and holiday shoppers, but the store is especially popular among collectors.
Though Christmas is a one-day-a-year event, there are people who seek, collect, and display Christmastime wares year round. These Christmas collectors might have a special affinity for designer Christopher Radko’s mouth-blown glass ornaments or they might prefer the LGBTQ+-friendly mermen by December Diamonds — both of which are stocked at City Lights.
You’ll find Santas for days at this forever-Christmas store. (Lara McCaffrey)
But for most, the biggest draw of this forever-Christmas store is its vast inventory of Department 56 miniatures. From snow-covered thatched roof houses to tiny figurines of Victorian carolers, Department 56 is widely regarded as the top manufacturer of holiday miniatures.
When collectors visit City Lights, they’ll spend upwards of an hour roaming the store’s aisles, inspecting every glass display case and inch of wall space to find the latest and greatest Christmas products.
Despite its unchanging seasonal appearance, City Lights has thrived throughout the years. Its showroom has grown from 1,000 square-feet to 28,000 square-feet with 54 full-time employees since Brian Young and his wife Laura opened the store 28 years ago.
A soft-spoken Londoner, Brian — who is now in his 80s — has a personality that some might say contrasts with the store’s colorful, cheerful demeanor. A serious businessman intent on having the best products possible, Brian and his son Spencer, who now runs the business, travel regularly to manufacturers around the country to source the best and most unique collectibles. There’s no product on the floor that Brian hasn’t inspected prior to sale, he told OK Whatever.
Surprisingly, Brian has never been a collector of miniatures himself.
Nor is he particularly big on celebrating holidays — his reason being that his work takes up all his time. He said his wife is in charge of decorating their home for the holidays and even then, she does so “very lightly.”
Hark! The herald angels sing…at City Lights. (Lara McCaffrey)
Brian found himself in the collectibles business after retiring from the jewelry industry and moving to San Diego with his family. But he soon grew bored and decided working part-time would fix that. He opened City Lights in September of 1991, planning for it to only be open just six weeks out of the year.
That clearly didn’t happen.
“We hit a niche and we've been going ever since,” Brian said. Hands in his jacket pockets, he talked calmly over the din of City Lights’ customer service reps taking phone orders in their small but bustling office.
Seasonal products aside, City Lights is not particularly easy to find, which makes its prolonged existence even more astounding.
“We're in a dead-end street where we have no pulsing trade,” Brian explained. “Whoever comes to us has come because they want something ... the majority of our new customers are on recommendation.”
Department 56 has been churning out holiday miniatures since 1976. (Lara McCaffrey)
It helps that City Lights specializes in a unique and specific market, with the bulk of collectors flocking to it for its Department 56 miniatures. Consisting of everything from houses to people, Department 56’s collections include its core-brand of Christmas-themed miniature villages, as well as a Halloween village, villages based on iconic pop culture characters like The Addams Family, and brand-inspired villages like its Dairy Queen world. Thirty bucks can usually buy you a figurine of an old-timey lamplighter lighting a gaslamp, whereas a tiny home might set you back more than $100.
That might seem like a lot, but for collectors of Christmas miniatures, it’s just a drop in the bucket. Many of them own hundreds of pieces and keep them on display in their homes year round.
That’s what Brandon Taylor, the vice president of a Department 56 collecting club called the National Council of 56 Clubs (NCC), does.
He keeps his permanent display of Christmas miniatures at his mom’s house in Little Rock, Arkansas and estimates that he owns close to 700 pieces. His Halloween village takes up an entire room, while other villages are set up around the house on places like the fireplace mantle or the baby grand piano.
City Lights is a treasure trove of tiny towns. (Lara McCaffrey)
In fact, his collection is so expansive that a good portion still remains in storage.
“I have about 150 houses right now that are not in displays because of lack of time to do the displays,” Taylor told OK Whatever via email.
Even so, he’s adamant about not selling his pieces, the only exception being if he has duplicates. For many collectors, it’s their love for the holidays that drives their giant collections.
“There are people that are really into Christmas,” Michele Brown, a Department 56 and Christmas ornament collector in Murrieta, California, said.
“Anybody who loves Christmas is going to go into [a Christmas] store. If you're traveling across the country and you know of a store that sells Department 56, you're going to make a point of going into that store. ... [to] see what they have, to see their displays.”
Stores that sell Department 56 products aren’t necessarily year-round Christmas stores like City Lights, either. Big retailers like Sears and Hallmark carry Department 56 items, as does the theme park Knott's Berry Farm. You can also find listings on eBay and Craigslist.
There are even times when a store might carry products that others don’t have. For example, Brown recently purchased a Mickey Mouse miniature from Sears that no other retailer sold in 2019.
Anything can be a Christmas ornament, even a pack of Reese’s. (Lara McCaffrey)
Collecting Department 56’s miniatures is often a pastime that families share with their children. Collector Scott McKevitt told Buzzfeed that he and his 10-year-old son Nicholas start setting up their 70-piece Christmas village in November of each year. It’s a tradition they’ve done since Nicholas was 5.
Of course sometimes children want nothing to do with their parents’ collections.
But Taylor, the V.P. of Department 56’s national collecting club, has noticed a burgeoning interest in Department 56 products amongst teenagers. He thinks the brand’s new pop-culture-inspired products, like their recent Minecraft village, are to thank for this renewed interest.
Speaking with OK Whatever, he recalled meeting a woman whose 15-year-old daughter wanted nothing to do with her mother’s Charles Dickens or Halloween-themed Department 56 villages. That is, until the brand’s Harry Potter products hit stores.
“The day that [Department 56 did] the live video revealing Harry Potter, she's like, ‘Mom, this building and your village and that building there, that could go in my Harry Potter [village] when we get Harry Potter,’” Taylor recounted. “That really excited me — to know that we're looking at another generation that's going to embrace these collectibles.”
Black Santas? Yeah, City Lights has them, too. (Lara McCaffrey)
City Lights is quite famous among collectors but it isn’t the only Christmas-forever store out there. Robert Moore & Co. in Mobile, Alabama, the Christmas Tree Hill stores in Pennsylvania, and The Incredible Christmas Place in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, are also known as huge players in the Christmas retail industry due to the enormousness of their collectibles stock.
In fact, Taylor himself is an employee at a forever-Christmas store in Little Rock, Arkansas, called All Thru The House. When they don’t have a particular product a customer is seeking, he’ll often refer them to City Lights’ online store to find it.
He said he has yet to visit the San Diego shop in real life, but “from what everyone has always told me about City Lights, it's a destination.”
A section of the store looks like a veritable forest, faux snow and all. (Lara McCaffrey)
It’s easy to get into the yuletide spirit when you’re perusing the glitzy knick-knacks at City Lights, or any forever-Christmas store for that matter. But it can be hard not to wonder how they stay open year-round.
The answer, it seems, can be found within their customer base. Collecting holiday tchotchkes isn’t just a once-a-year pastime for them — it’s a life passion. And stores like City Lights, where it’s Christmas forever, recognize that.
(This article was originally published on December 20, 2019)
Lara McCaffrey is a California-based writer with bylines in Psychology Today, San Diego CityBeat, Out There podcast, and more. When she's not writing, she enjoys anxiety cleaning her apartment.
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