One hurdle for a retailer or website selling outdoor Christmas decorations is the great concentration of the sales. We ship about 75% of our annual sales from September through December. This means cash flow and staffing pressures at different times of the year and , quite frankly, a lot of golf from May to September. Not too bad, you say, but golf lacks the satisfaction of helping a customer choose a new Nativity set for their church or working on a custom Nutcracker for a bricks and mortar retailer.
One solution, for us, was the creation of our Spring/Summer/Fall lawn and garden website, Saint Francis Garden. Since we have a strong Christian theme in our Christmas Night Inc. website, it was natural for us to choose a theme of Christian saints for our garden site. Choosing Saint Francis of Assisi as our “patron” was also easy also. The story of Saint Francis is inspiring and resonates with our current concerns with preserving nature and the environment. He has been called “the patron saint of the birds and the bees” and there are many stories about his communication with wild animals.
Saint Francis is also known for creating “Live Nativity” recreations of the birth of Jesus using farm animals and village people to fill the roles of the original participants. Our first vision of this site was similar to an ancient churchyard or monastery garden complete with fountains, birdbaths urns and planters, but soon, the demands of our website visitors and customers pushed us more and more into religious statuary and that is nearly our entire focus today. At times we struggle to add to the figures of Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the more “popular” saints and we are open to suggestions from you as to what to add next. Please send ideas in your comments.