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LAS CRUCES - Look out, 12 days until Christmas.
I know, I know, most of you have already finished your shopping, mailed off the holiday cards, have the ingredients for pies and other goodies all lined up neatly on the pantry shelf or in the refrigerator, and you have a warm, snugly, impossibly red Santa sweater hanging in the closet, ready for the big day. Right?
But for those poor saps among us who still have a wee bit of shopping left to do - or actually start the process - there are many choices: the national retailers; the smaller local stores; the Internet; gift cards.
Increasingly, more of you, along with some of our
neighboring Texans and a variety of other out-of-towners, are hitting the shops in Old Mesilla.
Heck, even former first lady Laura Bush poked her head into a couple of Mesilla shops last week.
"I've broken records from Black Friday on," said Janyce Leone, owner of Solamente de Mesilla on Calle de Parian. "On Black Friday, I doubled what I did last year. We got gift cards and they're working out well."
Maria Sanchez stopped in from El Paso last week.
"I haven't been up here in a while," she said. "It just seemed like fun, something different. Shop the little stores, get something to eat."
Johna Moore, manager of Del Sol International Shop on the Mesilla Plaza, said this holiday season is shaping up to surpass last year.
"Even before Thanksgiving, it picked up," Moore said. "Last October was down, but this year was great and we're
Leone said some Mesilla stores have extended hours for the holidays.
"The weather's been perfect for that," she said. "The (Christmas) lights look so pretty."
Moore said her store will be one of the ones open on Christmas Eve day.
"We'll have people coming in for gifts at the last moment," she said.
The National Retail Federation reports that, when all is said and done, holiday sales are expected to increase 2.3 percent this year to $447.1 billion. While that growth remains slightly lower than the 10-year average holiday sales increase of 2.5 percent, it would be an improvement from both last year's 0.4 percent uptick and the dismal 3.9 percent holiday sales decline retailers experienced in 2008.
In addition, when you shop in Mesilla, you might notice more folks kicking it old school and using cold, hard cash. Recent reports show that millions of Americans are using credit cards a lot more infrequently since last year's holiday shopping season.
According to the credit bureau TransUnion, 8 million Americans have stopped using credit cards since the third quarter of 2009. In fact, 78 million consumers either don't have access to a general purpose credit card or choose not to use one.
Brook Stockberger can be reached at (575) 541-5457.
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