The Christmas season is fast approaching. Shop shelves everywhere are filling up with Christmas foods and decorations. There is one shop in Stirling especially that catches the eye when walking around the centre.
The windows are full of Christmas items and as you walk in it is like stepping into a Christmas wonderland. The shop is called Tinsel & Tartan and it’s located right in the centre of Stirling on 2 Spittal Street.
The owner is a lovely woman. Lyndsey McDermott – born and raised in Stirling – has kept the shop for nearly three years now. The Covid-19 pandemic has posed a lot of challenges but keeping a Christmas shop year-round is not easy, even without a pandemic.
“The government grants for a small business like mine have really helped a lot”, says Lyndsey. She says that online sales have also been better than nothing, but for her, they were more important because they gave her “something meaningful to do”.
Logically, the busiest time for the shop would be the holiday season but after taking a long pause to think, Lyndsey says the summer is actually a busier time for her because there’s more competition during the holiday season.
There are more tourists in the summer too. Lyndsey says: “People collect baubles for Christmas trees from their travels like I’ve done for the past 25 years.”
Yet it’s not only tourists that come to the shop. Lyndsey says it is “a good mix of both and the locals like that my prices are not too high”.
The prices are indeed reasonable and you can get her bestseller, a local handmade bird glass ornament, for just £12. Most of Lindsey’s products come from local small producers as she likes to “support local crafters as much as possible”.
The name of the shop catches the eye and is very memorable. The story behind the name is also a fun one.
Lyndsey says: “I wanted something Scottish, and something Christmassy, and this was the first name that came to my head.
“I didn’t want to name it Tinsel and Tartan because the initials would have been TAT, so that’s why there is the & mark instead of an and.”
Feature image credit: Tinsel & Tartan
