Christmas All Year Long?

Cardinal Fabric

Are you aware that fabrics ordered at spring market usually don’t get to the shops until September/October?  And when we go to fall market the fabric we will order will not be arriving until after the new year and even spring?  It was really hard for me to wrap my mind around this when I first became a quilt shop owner. 
 
Imagine yourself as a quilt shop owner.  It is December and you are trying hard to move that Christmas fabric off the shelves so you don’t have to take it into the new year.  A fabric representative comes by and wants to show you their Christmas line.  Really?  That is certainly not the time to approach you about that kind of line, you are concerned about the fabric that you currently have because you know the week after Christmas you will have to discount it. 
 
The purchase date of fabric is getting pushed further and further ahead.  When I first began Prairie Quilt my Christmas fabric would arrive in September, now if it doesn’t arrive by June it is considered late.  Customers expect to see fabric by early summer now. Will we be seeing Christmas goods arriving in spring within the next few years?  Sometimes I feel retail has displayed Christmas so early that the holly and garland have lost their appeal. 
 
And where is the little baby Jesus in all this commercialism?  Sorry, I am really on a tangent about this today.
 
I will be ordering Christmas fabric soon because I don’t want to disappoint my customers in 2016.  But sometimes I just want to say to the fabric vendors “give it a rest!”