It seems that more and more businesses are decorating for the holidays
             - and not just the big holidays like New Year's and July 4 but a range of
             holidays both large and small, from holidays tied to religions such as
             Christmas and Easter and Passover but also holidays tied to specific ethnic
             groups like St. Patrick's Day and Kwanzaa as well as holidays that
             everybody knows are made up but that we still take time to celebrate anyway
             - such as Mother's Day. Many and indeed probably most businesses decorate
             their stores in keeping with at least some holidays both because the owners
             may themselves enjoy such decorations and because they believe that it will
             help their sales. This paper examines whether this last is in fact the
             To understand what role holiday decorations may play in marketing a
             particular store or a particular product, we should perhaps here provide a
             basic definition of what marketing itself is. Marketing includes each and
             every activity that is required to get the services or goods in question
             from the producer to the consumer. This sounds perhaps a little overly
             complicated than is necessary, but that is only because we have phrased
             common activities such as running ads in a daily newspaper in a somewhat
             The specific content of marketing activities has changed very
             dramatically over the last century - and has in fact probably changed
             during the last week. It has also become increasingly important: Marketing
             is far more pervasive than it has ever been. Marketing forces may now well
             be the primary force behind a new product: In large corporations marketing
             often precedes the actual manufacture of a product. Marketing for many
             firms has come to include all of the researching and development of new
             products and so now often occupies a substantial amount of a firm's time
             and money. But a good deal of marketing for stores (rather than
             ...