By Adam Frisk
The 2025 holiday shopping season was a banner year, thanks to the early arrival of winter weather, community loyalty, and a surge in tourism, according to local businesses.
For stores like Algonquin Outfitters and Delancey Sports, the weeks leading up to the New Year were defined by high traffic and a shared sense of community support.
“This holiday season was really good. It picked up early on in December with our sales. We started our Black Friday sales in late November, and they continued into the December holiday season,” Scott Swaga of Algonquin Outfitters said in a recent interview. Lots of people were stocking up on clothing, winter goods, and hard goods like snowboards and skis. The early winter season has really helped us out. People are already out on the trails and enjoying what the winter season is bringing us.”
Over at Delancey Sports, the season was marked by a noticeable increase in both foot traffic and total sales compared to last year.
“Year over year, it’s definitely up,” Erika Mozes said. “It was really nice to see the community come out and support our business in particular, like the Roots product. Just giving the gift of Roots and Haliburton to others definitely helped with our sales this December as well.”
The holiday shopping rush was further bolstered by excitement surrounding the store’s future, the co-owner said.
“Everybody who was coming in was also coming in to check out the store and say congrats on the new building,” Mozes explained.
While many retailers rely on Boxing Day sales to further drive profits, the folks at Delancey Sports stuck to their values and deliberately avoided deep, post-Christmas discounts out of respect for their pre-holiday customers.
“So we actually purposely don’t do a big Boxing Day sale. We just don’t think that it’s right that people support us right before the holidays and then we discount our products right afterwards,” Mozes said. “But you know we still had great traffic in Haliburton throughout that week.”
Buying local was a recurring theme for the holiday season.
“I’m always nervous that Amazon’s my biggest competitor, but people were actively telling me they were coming here instead of shopping online,” Kelsey Redman, owner of Redmans Records, said.
While Redman noted that this was her first holiday season as owner of the record shop, she explained that Christmas Eve was “insanely busy,” with the majority of customers being “panicking dads and husbands” looking for a last-minute gift.
Locals seemed to have been the main support for early holiday sales, but the weekend between Christmas and New Year’s saw an influx of tourism that helped push further sales in Haliburton.
“I had a few road trippers—there was a lot of tourism I found still between Christmas and New Year’s,” Redman said while recounting a particularly memorable sale. “I definitely sold a cowbell secretly to somebody who was in a car with six people and who was going to surprise them with it in the middle of the road trip.
“We Googled all the songs, the cowbell solos, and she made a playlist,” Redman said with a laugh.
The holiday spirit carried over to restaurants, with hungry shoppers dining out in town. At Juna, the week between Christmas and New Year’s saw the dining room reach capacity.
“It was lovely,” said server Andrea Hildebrand. “We were very busy between Christmas and New Year’s. That week was busy—lunches, dinners, we were full every day. It was great.”
Businesses are now bracing for the inevitable post-holiday quiet, a standard part of the business cycle.
