Thanksgiving is over and done with.  The 2025 PopCult Gift Guide is beginning its last week.  December begins tomorrow.

We are officially in the Christmas season.

To kick things off, we are going to bring you an encore of last year’s visit to one of the first-ever Spirit Christmas stores, which was located in Erie, Pennsylvania. Now, we actually went to another one this year, just South of Pittsburgh, and you’ll get a photo essay from that sometime after we wrap up The Gift Guide, but now we’re going to revisit our first visit to the first year of Spirit Christmas as we plopped our sizable footprint in the metaphorically virgin snow of specialized holiday mass-market retail.

Above you see a not-safe-for-work video travelogue, wherein you humble blogger wanders through the Spirit Christmas Store in Erie for about fifteen minutes, making snarky comments (many of them off-color) while shakily shooting video of the massive holiday retail overload.

I’m sure all my readers are familiar with Spirit Halloween stores, which move in like a hermit crab and occupy vacant storefronts for a few months each year to hawk their fine Halloween wares.

Last year they took baby steps toward bringing the concept of seasonal retail to Christmas. They only opened ten stores, nationwide. This year they opened over 30, and while the one in Pittsburgh was our target, we also happened across one in Canton, Ohio, on the way there (we didn’t go in because we were too tired at that point–PopCulting can be hard work).

What you see in the above video is lightly edited.  I sped up some of the dead spots but didn’t edit them out completely. I’m also uncensored, so maybe you don’t want to blast this loud at work. There’s one f-bomb, and a harshly-scatalogical reference to poo a couple of times. There are also some major-league obscenities displayed on the ugly sweaters and one reference to buttplugs.

In all fairness, we were pretty much caught up in the irreverent spirit of the store, which had more cynical, goofy, alcohol-fueled and profane celebrations of the holiday than wholesome or religious ones.

As we revisit this first volley of weaponized holiday cheer, please remember that it’s all meant in the spirit of good fun and if you are offended by any of it, after reading this, then I am so sorry you are offended by that.

Following a post-Gift Guide vacation while we run to Chicago for a few days, I will return with some fresh photo essays and video from a November trip that included Sir Troy’s Toy Kingdom, a different Spirit Christmas store and the majesty of Kraynak’s.

But even while I’m gone, there will be fresh content in PopCult every day, including five more days of The 2025 PopCult Gift Guide.