Each year on the fourth Thursday in November, Americans gather for a day
of feasting, football and family. While today’s Thanksgiving
celebrations would likely be unrecognizable to attendees of the original
1621 harvest meal, it continues to be a day for Americans to come
together around the table—albeit with some updates to pilgrim’s menu.
This year Americans will spend a whopping $6 billion on Christmas decorations, including LED lights, 16-foot-tall inflatable Santas and pre-decorated Christmas trees.
This marks the highest amount ever recorded by the National Retail
Federation, which started tracking the information back in 2005.
Major retailers like Home Depot, the world's biggest home-improvement company, and Lowe's,
the world's second-largest, are capitalizing on the fervor by
increasing tree and decoration orders in the hopes of setting demand for
home appliances, Chris Burritt reports in Bloomberg.
“This is a business we should own,” Home Depot's chief financial officer Carol Tome
told Burritt. “We were selling the most trees of any retailer in
America, but we weren’t offering the ornaments or the light strings or
the tree stands. So we expanded our assortment.”
Holiday decoration sales may climb 8.1 percent, up for the second
year in a row. Additionally, more than 68 percent of consumers will
participate in holiday festivities, the highest level seen in the past
three years, the National Retail Federation finds.
As for trees, consumers will spend $3.4 billion on them– $800 million on real ones and $2.6 billion on the fake ones, Bloomberg reports.
