One thing locals and customers looked forward to every year was the annual Christmas Open House event. Employees would close the shop on Saturday afternoon and put brown paper on the windows so no one could see inside. When the paper was removed and the shop opened to a line of customers on Sunday afternoon, shoppers were met with a winter wonderland. Heartstrings served spiced cider and homemade cookies and played Christmas music. It was the first hint of the Christmas season to the early bird shopper’s delight. Sam Jolly, former Heartstrings employee, fondly remembers the evenings of Christmas set-up. “We would stay up all night and Mrs. Thrash would order pizza and bring in all kinds of sweets,” Jolly said. “I loved seeing how the store would transform when everybody worked together. People do some funny things at three in the morning when they’ve been decorating for six hours!” Another event customers could look forward to was Sorority Bid Day for Auburn University. Parents called Heartstrings weeks in advance to place an order to be boxed and delivered to their daughter who received a sorority bid. Heartstrings received the bid list and set up an assembly line in their storage room to assemble the signature brown boxes and tie them with ribbon in the sorority colors. They were then hand-delivered to the dorm rooms. Merilyn Hand, a senior at Auburn University, recalls hearing about Heartstrings in her hometown of Birmingham, Ala., before coming to Auburn. “I remember walking up the stairs (at Heartstrings) where all the sorority things were and thinking ‘I feel like I’ve waited my whole life to walk up these stairs and pick out my Heartstrings sorority things’,” said Hand.
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