Frankenmuth — Nicole Whitaker says she never gets sick of Christmas, even though she has celebrated it every day at work for the last 29 years. Her job is to help stock the items at Bronner’s, which calls itself “the world’s largest Christmas store.” That’s a plausible boast, given that Bronner’s sells about 2 million ornaments each year, plus Nativity scenes, trees, stockings, Bibles, and more, from a seven-acre building that includes more than two acres of retail space. “It’s a happy place,” says Whitaker. “You see smiles everywhere.”
She’s not even weary of the store’s Christmas music, which plays year-round, though she admits that she often tunes it out. “Then sometimes I’ll get in my car and put on Christmas carols for the drive home,” says Whitaker, who parks among the 1,470 spaces that surround the complex. This sea of striped asphalt accommodates the hordes of shoppers who descend on Bronner’s in the weeks before December 25. More than 28,000 people have shown up to shop on a single day.
“Our store is dedicated to keeping Christ in Christmas,” says Dietrich Bronner, head of product development for the company, whose full stylized name is “BRONNER’S CHRISTmas WONDERLAND.” It’s also a shrine to entrepreneurship, a unique family-run business that combines commerce with Christmas cheer.
Bronner’s is in Frankenmuth, a city of about 5,000 near Saginaw. Founded in 1845 by Lutheran immigrants from Germany—“Franken” refers to their native Franconia, and “muth” is from the German word for “courage”—the city has become a tourist destination noted for its stores and restaurants. Most drivers pass under a 160-foot archway with a friendly message in the old tongue: “Willkommen.” Yet Frankenmuth’s most famous attraction is Bronner’s, which draws visitors from everywhere, including those who unload from packed tourist buses. Many have seen Bronner’s billboards around the Midwest, but the best-known billboard has stood for decades alongside I-75 in Ocala, Florida. Motorists who continue north on the interstate highway for more than a thousand miles can make it to Bronner’s in about 16 hours.
This pilgrimage site is the creation of the late Wally Bronner. Born in Frankenmuth in 1927, he grew up speaking German and English. As a boy, he helped his older brother Arnold festoon the windows of his aunt’s grocery store. When Arnold was drafted into the Army during World War II, Wally took sole responsibility. “It seemed more like a hobby than like work,” he wrote in a memoir. “I never realized that display work would be part of my life-long vocation.”
In the 1950s, Bronner was a young man with a growing business that supplied and arranged displays for stores in Bay City and Saginaw. He also painted words and images on trucks and signs, learning the lettering and artistry that made his products attractive and attention-getting. He thought about going to college to study chemical engineering, but instead he stuck with his work and wisecracked that rather than becoming a scientist he had become a “signtist.” After business leaders in Clare hired him to trim the city’s downtown lampposts for Christmas, Bronner devoted himself to the Christmas trade. For the rest of his life, he decked the halls of workplaces and homes.
At first, it was all display work for government and commercial clients: wreaths and street streamers as well as jumbo Santas, sleighs, and reindeer, plus the floodlights to keep them lit. Bronner invited mayors and city managers, presidents of chambers of commerce, owners of car dealerships, and other potential buyers to visit his showrooms in Frankenmuth. Guests received tickets for free chicken dinners at nearby Zehnder’s Restaurant, and many brought their wives, who started to ask a question that would transform Bronner’s business: “What do you have for the home?”
That’s how Bronner got into ornaments. Today, the store sells them in about 8,000 varieties. It still has a division that provides Christmas displays for cities, churches, malls, and even movie sets, but around 80% of revenues come from consumers who want to decorate their trees and embellish their homes. The bulk of these sales is from people who walk into the store, which moved to its current location on the outskirts of town in 1977. “People come here as a part of their family traditions,” says Maria Bronner Sutorik, vice president of Bronner’s.
Her claim checks out: My wife and I are fiftysomething Michigan natives, and we can’t remember a time when we weren’t aware of Bronner’s, which we continue to visit when we’re close by, no matter the season. The discounts are good in February and March. The number of customers grows in the summer, as people make their way to the lakes and rivers of the north. In the fall, when deer-hunting season opens, there’s another sales spike on “Deer Widows Weekend.” Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, of course, the store is jammed. Autumn Bronner, who married Wally’s grandson Dietrich and hires personnel, says she expects the workforce this year to swell to more than 700 employees who ring up sales, fill online purchases, and otherwise try to keep order.
Shoppers come not only to buy but also to enjoy a spectacle. Outside the store, there’s a life-sized Nativity scene, three 17-foot-tall Santa statues, and the octagonal Silent Night Chapel, a replica of the Austrian original where the hymn “Silent Night” was written and first performed two centuries ago. Inside the store, lights flash and twinkle everywhere. Electrical bills used to top $1,200 per day, but they fell to $650 per day after the store replaced its incandescent bulbs with LEDs. Bronner’s estimates that in a typical year, it sells strings of Christmas lights whose combined length would stretch to nearly 500 miles.
The ornaments are the main attraction. There may be no place where it’s possible to see such sheer quantities or a wider range under one roof. They include everything from traditional orbs with images of the holy family, angels, and messages such as “Joy to the world” to ornaments in the shapes of pickup trucks, Chihuahuas inside tacos, and even a pink-and-white unicorn riding a turquoise Tyrannosaurus rex. The price of most items is less than $20, and about a third of the inventory changes each year.
“The ideal business place should have the element of theater,” wrote Wally, who often assumed the role of a showman, donning what the familiar song calls “gay apparel”: a red blazer and green pants, with a Christmas-themed tie from a collection of more than a hundred. “While some ties may be way outdated in terms of current fashion, every tie is in style for me, since they help me tell my stories,” he wrote. As Bronner roamed the floor, he enjoyed guessing where customers were from. Most were American but many traveled from abroad, and he could greet them in 60 languages. This was one part salesmanship and one part market research. “He always wanted to know what people were looking for,” says Sutorik, who is Wally’s daughter. Her brother Wayne is the current CEO of Bronner’s. Her sister and nephew, as well as a couple of spouses, also work for the company.
Wally Bronner died in 2008, but his successors still strive to figure out what customers want, accepting suggestions and trying to forecast fads. An ornament committee meets monthly to discuss ideas. “We’re always looking to spot the trends,” says Sutorik. “What are people asking for? What do we need to refresh?” About half of the store’s ornaments are designed in house and exclusive to Bronner’s. They are manufactured mostly in Hungary but also the United States, Poland, Germany, and China.
Lately, the ornament team has detected a surge of interest in the newfangled sport of pickleball. Bronner’s already sells several ornaments related to it, such as racquets, Santa figurines preparing to serve a ball, and one that says “Just Dink It,” which puns Nike’s slogan but refers to a type of shot. There’s even a white orb that carries the green image of an anthropomorphized pickle, with a dad joke: “I Love Pickleball. Dill with it!” They’re organized alongside ornaments of cornhole boards, curling rocks and brooms, and skateboards, in a section of the store otherwise devoted to the more conventional sports of football, baseball, and basketball.
Last summer, the ornament committee came up with a new concept that was both obvious and untried: an ornament in the shape of a pickleball, whose size and perforations make it look like a Wiffle ball. The job of designing it belongs to Shannon Hegenauer, an artist who works with suppliers to test sizes, shapes, and colors. “It should be ready next year,” she says. Bronner’s can order as few as 144 ornaments in a single type, but it prefers purchases of more than 1,000, with a goal of selling them out within two or three years.
Although Bronner’s is pleased to sell as many secular ornaments as people will buy, a sense of Christian mission animates the store. Sacred themes are more prominent on its racks and shelves than they are in the big-box stores that make up much of its competition. Starting on the day after Thanksgiving, employees are instructed to wish visitors “Merry Christmas” rather than the generic and ubiquitous “Happy holidays.” Every purchase comes with a free religious tract on topics such as hope, forgiveness, and Jesus. These change monthly. “Wally wanted to share the Gospel,” says Lori Libka, a communications assistant who has worked at Bronner’s for 27 years.
In the store’s early days, Wally Bronner threw Christmas parties in which the children of his employees received gifts of ornaments bearing their names, hand-lettered by the boss. These were so popular that they soon became available to customers. Today, personalized ornaments are the best-selling items at Bronner’s. They can be ordered on-site and ready in about an hour, after an artist paints a message and it dries in a pretzel-warming machine made for concession stands. A name on a red glass ball is the most common request.
“Nobody needs a thing that we sell,” says Sutorik. That may be true, but the world would be a little less festive without its largest Christmas store.
John J. Miller, the national correspondent for National Review and host of its Great Books podcast, is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. Follow him on X @heymiller. This story originally appeared at National Review.
