160 FRITZ BAHR'S COMMERCIAL FLORICULTURE 



of the business section of a town, a part of a store or a window 

 may be rented for two weeks or so and used for a Christmas display 

 where the heaviest traffic of the town will notice it. "Say it with 

 Flowers This Christmas" and other attractive folders may be left 

 at the drugstore, hotel or other prominent places of the town; 

 do everything and in every way to let people know that flowers are 

 the only thing for Christmas. 



Your preparations for Christmas are never completed if you 

 neglect to let everybody know about it, and often the last-minute 

 call in the way of folders, sent December twenty-second or twenty- 

 third does more good than anything mailed previously; yet you 

 want to do the other things as well. 



PREPARING FOR CHRISTMAS 



You may take orders for Christmas delivery right after Thanks- 

 giving, yet the real ordering often does not start until after the 

 middle of December. This is followed by the Christmas rush of the 

 last four or five days, during which you should do more business 

 than in the six weeks following. This means that you must get 

 ready in good time, prepare, plan and work out a way to conduct 

 that brief, unavoidable rush with the minimum of confusion, to ac- 

 complish the most, and to take and fill orders in the shortest possible 

 time without mistakes. 



The beginner should always bear in mind that while prac- 

 tically all of the stock he handles is more or less perishable, some of 

 it is more so than the rest. To have left on hand after Christmas 

 a lot of Poinsettias or tender Begonias may mean quite a loss, 

 while left-over palms, ferns and other decorative stock such as 

 Araucarias, Dracaenas, Pandanus and the like form a good asset 

 all through the year; we will come to that later. 



To start with the preparations: Baskets, pot-covers, ribbon, 

 crepe, tissue, wax and wrapping paper, boxes and other accessories 

 all can be purchased weeks or even months ahead for future delivery. 

 No one who has ever gone through a real rush, or found himself sold 

 out before the twenty-fifth of December, or who has tried to pur- 

 chase flowering stock the week before Christmas and failed to 

 obtain it, will let the ordering of such stock go until the want of it 

 is felt. 



Locate the stock you need weeks ahead and place your order 

 to be shipped at a certain time. As soon as Thanksgiving is over 

 the store or show house should begin to put on its holiday dress, 

 even if this consists only of a few bright Cyclamens with pot-covers 

 or in baskets with suitable ribbons on the handle, a few samples 

 of moderate-priced made-up baskets and some more expensive ones, 

 a vase of red Winterberries and Boxwood, and a well-made wreath 



