Local businesses prepare for last minute holiday shopping

With Christmas just five days away, last minute gift shopping is revving up.

If you have not completed your Christmas shopping yet, not to worry. There could be no better place to get your last-minute gifts than here on the Gulf Coast.

Local store owners such as Mockingbird Lane’s Janice Conoway or Dorothy Roberts of Robin’s Nest in Pass Christian have been making sure their shops are in peak condition for this final stretch of the shopping season.  Conoway said, “I’ve wrapped tons of gifts for the community and just people coming in and out from other places. It’s been good.”

Roberts said, “So, we saw a lot of traffic in the store, and we were ready for them and just grateful for people coming in and shopping small businesses.”

These two boutiques are known for their range of high-quality products that can be wonderful gifts to put under the tree. “Crystal jewelry and costume jewelry and then any kind of candle you can imagine and Christmas decorations.”

Now with this season having a bigger shopping boom compared to last year, the store owners made sure they kept all of their items in stock for their shoppers. “We’re a small business, so we were at the mercy of some of our vendors getting merchandise to us. Up until last week, we were still getting orders in.”

“I have reordered several times because I’ve had several things that I thought ‘okay I need this many of’ when no I needed way more than that.”

Roberts believes one of the biggest factors that play in the holiday shopping spree is the community’s support of local businesses. “We’re always happy and feel very blessed when people come in and we’re able to say ‘hey Bob! Hey Sarah! Hey Tony! Hey Brenda! These are people all the time who come and we are just very happy when they do that.”