A Seattle holiday tradition returns
Here’s something for the Seattle folks: Chubby & Tubby Christmas trees will be back this year! For many of us, buying trees at C&T was a yearly ritual. They had the cheapest trees in town (as well as some other, more expensive ones if you felt like splurging), and the trees were not bad quality, so every year we would go to one of the stores, trudge through the store following the painted path directing us to the tree shed, and leave with a nice tree and our wallets less than $5 lighter. (Just in the last few years the price started to go up a bit, but it was still low.) Then the stores went out of business earlier this year, and it seemed that another bit of Seattle history would be gone. Not for now, at least… and the link above mentions that one of the stores might yet reopen.
But will they bring back the cheap tennis shoes? Andthey had some pretty decent camping supplies. Ah, well, another casuality of the Home Depot/Loews Wars.
I wonder if a new C&T store could ever be like the originals. I think when they cleaned out all the old merchandise, they probably cleaned out all the character of the place, too.
Do you remember Fuji’s on N 45th? I miss that store, too. A classic old “dime store” with merchandise that had been sitting on the shelves for 20 years or so.