About Traditions
Traditions has never really been just a store.
It started with a family that loved the holidays, a grocery store that transformed into Christmas every year, and a belief that decorating should be fun, memorable, and maybe just a little over the top. More than three decades later, a lot has changed. We've moved, grown, lost people we love, welcomed new generations, shipped holiday treasures all over the world, and somehow accumulated more glitter than we ever thought humanly possible.
But the heart of Traditions is still very much the same.
It Started at Gary's Market
Long before Traditions opened its doors, Gary and Barbara Thomas were already obsessed with the holidays. Their family vacations often involved two mandatory stops: the best local bakery they could find and, naturally, a Christmas store.
Back home, Gary owned Gary's Market, a neighborhood grocery store in Southern California. One year, he decided to remove an entire aisle of groceries and replace it with Christmas decorations for the season. That aisle quickly became much more than an aisle.
The family decorated the market from ceiling to floor, with Gary, Barbara, their children, and anyone else they could recruit helping transform the store for Christmas. Customers loved it. The Christmas merchandise sold out long before the holiday arrived, and what began as a fun experiment became an annual tradition.
Eventually, Gary had another idea: why not open an entire store dedicated to the holidays?
1994: Traditions Is Born
The plan was to open a Christmas store in a vacant space near Gary's Market. Then, in January 1994, the Northridge earthquake hit.
The grocery store was heavily damaged, homes throughout the community were devastated, and suddenly opening a Christmas store wasn't exactly anyone's highest priority. But the Thomas family had never been particularly good at sitting still.
They began collecting damaged furniture that had been discarded after the earthquake and repairing it themselves. Cabinets, tables, chairs, and other pieces were restored with the intention of using them as displays in the new store.
There was just one problem.
People kept buying the furniture.
Before Traditions had even officially opened, customers would walk in, spot one of the restored pieces, and ask how much it cost. Again and again, the family's newly finished display furniture disappeared out the door.
Eventually, they managed to keep enough furniture in the building to actually decorate the place. Traditions officially opened in 1994.
Why "Traditions"?
The name came from Debi Thomas, Gary and Barbara's daughter and one of the founders of the store. After considering plenty of other possibilities, the word Traditions came to her one night.
It immediately felt right.
Holidays have always been about traditions. The decorations we unpack every year. The foods we make. The songs we play. The things our parents did that we swore we'd never do, only to find ourselves doing exactly the same thing years later.
Traditions wasn't just the name of the store. It was the reason the store existed.
From Christmas Store to Every Holiday
Traditions began primarily as a year-round Christmas store, but it didn't stay that way for long. Customers wanted Easter, Valentine's Day, patriotic decor, Thanksgiving, and more.
And then there was Halloween.
It became very clear, very quickly, that people were every bit as passionate about Halloween as we were. So Traditions grew into something much less common: a year-round, all-holiday store.
That philosophy still defines us today. Christmas and Halloween may take up quite a bit of real estate around here, but we believe every holiday deserves a little celebrating.
Traditions Goes Online
Not long after opening the store, Traditions ventured onto something relatively new at the time: the internet.
Our first website would be almost unrecognizable today. Images had to be tiny enough to load over dial-up connections, online shopping carts weren't really a thing yet, and many of our earliest website orders arrived by telephone, fax, or even regular mail.
Eventually, the technology improved. So did we.
Growing Traditions Online
Ryan Thomas began working at Traditions when he was just 16 years old and soon took over the design and development of the company's website and e-commerce operation. More than twenty years later, he still personally designs, builds, and maintains the site today. What began as a small extension of the retail store has grown into one of the most important parts of Traditions.
Over the years, we've shipped holiday decorations to customers throughout the United States and around the world. And despite how much the technology has changed, we've always tried to keep the experience personal.
There are real people behind this website! We remember longtime customers. We hunt for pieces people have been trying to find. We read your emails, pack your orders, photograph the products, answer your questions, and occasionally spend an unreasonable amount of time figuring out how to safely ship something incredibly fragile across the country.
Growing Up Without Growing Corporate
As Traditions grew online, the physical store grew with it. After 13 years in our original location, we moved into a much larger building with enough room for both our expanding warehouse operation and a full showroom.
That became our home for nearly eighteen years.
Throughout all of that growth, Traditions remained what it had always been: a family business. Gary could often be found repairing customers' broken collectibles or packing shipments. Barbara became responsible for much of the look and feel of the showroom, with an incredible natural talent for creating displays. Debi handled buying, merchandising, customers, and countless other parts of the business.
Ryan's role continued to grow as the online side of Traditions grew, eventually becoming responsible for much more than just the website. And along the way, employees became friends and friends became family.
That's still how Traditions operates today.
The People Who Built Traditions
A family business inevitably becomes intertwined with the lives of the people who built it.
In 2012, we lost Gary to ALS. His absence is still felt throughout Traditions. He was a builder, a problem solver, a shipping partner, and the kind of person who could somehow repair just about anything.
His influence never really left the building. Neither did his music.
There are still certain songs that will immediately remind us of Gary, particularly "White Christmas" and "Bad Moon Rising," which were known to occasionally result in the volume going up considerably.
Years later, our family faced another enormous loss. We lost Debi after a battle with cancer.
Debi had spent more than thirty years pouring an extraordinary amount of herself into Traditions. She discovered artists, chose products, built relationships with customers and vendors, decorated, packed orders, answered emails, created displays, and helped shape the personality of this company.
For a very long time, it was difficult to imagine Traditions without her.
And then we had to.
The Next Chapter
After Debi's passing, Ryan, Barbara, Vincent, and the rest of our small team were faced with figuring out what came next. There was never much discussion about whether Traditions would continue.
Of course it would.
We wanted to protect what Gary and Debi had built while also allowing the company to evolve into something new. Ryan took over the business, with Barbara still very much involved and Vincent, Ryan's best friend of more than thirty years and honorary brother, helping shoulder the enormous amount of work that goes into keeping this slightly crazy operation running.
Around them is a small team made up of family, longtime friends, and people who have become part of the Traditions family along the way. Together, we started imagining what the next thirty years of Traditions could look like.
And then, almost immediately, life decided to make things interesting.
The Great Traditions Move
Shortly after losing Debi, we learned that the building Traditions had called home for nearly eighteen years was going to be sold.
We had to move.
Not just a retail store, but a roughly 15,000-square-foot warehouse and showroom filled with decades of fixtures, displays, office equipment, packing stations, furniture, holiday decorations, and an absolutely absurd amount of inventory.
It felt nearly impossible.
We did it anyway.
Our team found a new home for Traditions and completely renovated the space to fit our needs. We built, painted, repaired, wired, moved, assembled, cleaned, designed, decorated, and problem-solved our way through the entire project.
Whenever possible, we did the work ourselves. And we mean that literally. At one point, Ryan spent more than forty hours individually cutting and hanging ceiling tiles to fit the new showroom.
There were incredibly long days, very little sleep, a lot of dust, and several moments when we wondered exactly what we had gotten ourselves into. But somehow, in record time, Traditions moved.
And we opened the doors to our new home.
A New Home for Traditions
Walking into the finished showroom for the first time felt like the beginning of something. We had taken an empty warehouse space and turned it into a new home for a company our family had spent more than thirty years building.
The response from our customers has meant more to us than we can adequately explain. People who shopped with us in our previous locations have come through the doors and immediately understood what we were trying to create.
A place worth visiting.
A place where you can wander through displays, discover artists you've never seen before, find something completely unexpected, and hopefully leave feeling a little happier than when you walked in.
Customers have called Traditions their "happy place" for years. That's a description we never take for granted.
Still Family. Still Traditions.
Today, Traditions is both very different from the little holiday store that opened in 1994 and remarkably similar.
We still seek out unusual artists and products. We still get ridiculously excited when a shipment arrives. We still build displays ourselves, obsess over the details, answer customer emails, and pack and ship from our own warehouse.
And when something breaks, there is a very good chance somebody around here will attempt to fix it.
Most importantly, we're still surrounded by friends and family.
Traditions has made it through earthquakes, relocations, enormous changes in retail, the rise of e-commerce, personal loss, and more than a few sleepless holiday seasons.
We're incredibly proud of where we've been, but we're even more excited about where we're going.
Thank you for being part of our story. Whether you've been shopping with us since 1994 or discovered Traditions five minutes ago, we're very glad you're here.
Happy Holidays Everyone!
The Traditions Family
