Black Friday and Shop Small Saturday are ideal times to buy from Savannah's creatives

Before standing in line at a big box retailer on Black Friday or settling in for some online retail therapy, consider patronizing an indie shop in Savannah and participating in Small Business Saturday. Better yet, consider ways of supporting local creatives through our art columnist's suggestions:

A real toy store has opened on Savannah's east side

Before my dad passed, I can remember him lamenting the demise of toy stores. When Christmas came around, he told me, he used to love to walk the aisles and just discover things that might be the perfect gift for me or my sister, even though we hadn’t asked for anything specifically.

Now that I have a son of my own, one who just turned four years old, I understand where my dad was coming from. Yes, shopping online is very convenient and generally cheaper than a little local toy store can ever be, but those cost savings come at the price of gift spontaneity and customer service. And heading to the toy sections of places like Walmart or Target, it’s like stepping into an advertisement for whatever big name character the mass manufacturers want you to buy for your kid this holiday season.

Enter The Magical World of Toys.

The new locally owned spot at 1602 Waters Ave., in an area that’s seeing new independent businesses popping up on what seems like a monthly basis, likely has my dad smiling in the afterlife at what it’s offering to Savannah.

“I’m trying to bring the fun here,” said store owner Dante Pierson. “Kids coming in here and playing the games, that’s fun. And the parents love it because then they can see that, yes, [the kids] do like it.”

Affable, frenetic, and a kid at heart, the 42 year old father lives and breathes toys. His first job was at a specialty toy shop when he was just 13 years old, where he worked his way from stock boy to manager over the course of eight years at the company.

“Everybody I worked with was fun,” he related. “It was working in a toy store, so we’d play. That was our job.

“My most fun job that I ever had was working at a toy store,” Pierson went on to say. “It was something I always wanted to do.”

Becoming an adult, however, with the very adult pressures of paying rent, buying food, and having a car, required a career change simply to make ends meet.

But the dream of owning his own store never died, and in opening The Magical World of Toys, Pierson’s lifelong passion for play shines through. As we toured the surprisingly large space, he pointed out some of his favorite items, most of which I’d never seen before, made by companies that were new to me.

One Italian brand, Headu, for example, had a bunch of Montessori-endorsed toys, including a really interesting-looking coding game, and lots of products aimed to help kids expand their reading, writing, and math skills.

“They’ve got fun things, and his is stuff you don’t see anywhere else,” he explained. “And it’s good quality. You feel good about having your kid play with it.”

That isn’t to say that they don’t carry things like mini-drones, princess costumes, air forts, and activities like “Exit: The Game,” which mimics the escape room experience at home; they do. It’s just that their take on those items is well-curated to include the kind of quality that the major retailers simply don’t have on their shelves.

“That’s another thing about being a small store, is that I buy from small manufacturers, small vendors, things like that,” Pierson noted. “So Little Adventurers [the costume line they carry], it’s all really good quality stuff that you’re gonna wash, reuse over and over again.”

By the end of my conversation with the owner, I found myself swept up into the magic of what my dad had lamented the loss of. I’d like to think that he was there with me in spirit, nodding his approval, as I picked up “Cowpie Catapults” for my son as I was leaving, a “hilarious to a four year old and his 46 year old dad” poop-slinging game that the boy and I had played on previous visits to The Magical World of Toys.

“I feel like kids are kids forever,” said Pierson as I nodded in agreement. “And if you get something cool that’s fun, no matter what age, the kid’s gonna like it.”

Follow the shop on Instagram @themagicalworldoftoys, and check out the website at themagicalworldoftoys.com.

Record Store Day and Black Friday at Graveface

There’s about a 50/50 chance on any given day that I’ll be wearing a Graveface t-shirt, so I’m not going to pretend that I’m unbiased when I recommend that you shop at their stores this Black Friday, which also happens to be Record Store Day. I’m also not going to apologize for saying that they’re some of the most fun and interesting retail spaces in Savannah to visit, and yes, you should shop at their stores.

“The cool thing that we’re doing at [the flagship Starland location], yes we’ll have those Record Store Day titles…[but also] I’m bringing 1,200 used records that we haven’t had in the Starland shop,” said Graveface mastermind Ryan Graveface during a recent phone call.

In the last few years, the Graveface brand has expanded well beyond its humble roots at 5 W. 40th St., to include a pinball hall, a museum, a performance venue, a Chicago location, and a second Savannah retail location inside of Oglethorpe Mall. And it’s their move to Chicago that has allowed its founder to collect a wealth of the new used merch that will be hitting the shelves at the original spot on Black Friday.

But beyond these records, which Ryan says includes rare international pressings and limited run albums, the store will be bringing back their “free record drop,” a popular yearly event that they haven’t done since before the pandemic.

“So if I buy a collection, say there’s a hundred records, inevitably they’re going to be 8-12 records that are just a little too far gone for me to feel comfortable putting a price tag on them,” he explained. “And we save all of those, and we give them all away.”

“But it’s not Johnny Mathis,” he continued. “It’s, like, The Cramps. It’s cool shit.”

Locally, the mall location won’t officially be a part of Record Store Day this year, but Ryan is offering a special, limited edition tote bag to everyone who spends at least $100 on Black Friday.

“We usually do a sampling of all of the things that we do,” he said of the contents of the bags. “Meaning, there’ll be a small taxidermy piece or some sort of light oddity, in conjunction with an LP, or a cassette, or something that was released by the Graveface imprint. And then the same on the Terrorvision imprint, but yet that would be blu-ray, cassette, LP, or even VHS, because we release all those different formats. So it’s a way to see the scope of what we do.”

Both Savannah stores will also be having flash sales throughout the day, sales that will be announced on their social media accounts, including @graveface_sav on Instagram. Again, I could pretend here that I’m not biased, but I’m just going to admit right now that I’ll be following along to see what deals come up.

“The reality is that all those big box stores are soulless,” Ryan opined as we were ending our call. “And a place like Graveface isn’t. That’s the simplicity of it.”

Shop Small Saturday at Sulfur Studios

Raise your hand if you remember the days when Sulfur Studios had holes in the ceiling, literally smelled like sulfur, and could at times seem like an abandoned building.

Now under the umbrella of ARTS Southeast, the whole operation has come a long way from its humble beginnings. Stepping into what was once a lobby with questionable couches but now serves as The Sulfur Shop, a downright polished storefront that wouldn’t feel out of place in any arts district anywhere in America, it’s pretty incredible the kind of art that you can find literally sitting on shelves.

“We have some great new ceramics by Casey Crump,” said ARTS Southeast Exhibitions Assistant and Director of Public Relations Samantha Mack. “Stella Renee is a local fiber artist. She has some new hand-dyed bandanas.”

During a recent visit, I also saw Emily Earl’s excellent photography volume, Late Night Polaroids, and a print by local eco-artist Lisa D. Watson on one table, next to which a small book shelf featured works by Jessica Leigh Lebos and Cindy Male.

Oh, and then there’s the galleries.

“We also have our annual affordable small works show right now,” she continued, referring to ‘Off The Wall,’ currently exhibiting in the Supporter Gallery. “So the entire hallway is small works that you can take off the wall on purchase, and they’re all $300 or less.”

The list of artists in the exhibition is practically a who’s who of folks who have some connection to Sulfur Studios, like Maxx Feist, Jordan Fitch Mooney, and Chris Moss, but which also includes other local luminaries who are usually showing elsewhere, like Betsy Cain and Brian MacGregor. To be frank, some of these artists just don’t sell work this cheap almost ever, so it’s worth a visit to see if anything might be gift-worthy just for that reason. And if you do have more to spend, you can also check out 'LOOK!' in the Main Gallery, which adds folks like Marcus Kinney and Sharon Norwood to those whose work you can add to your collection.

But for me, perhaps the perfect stocking stuffer takes the form of ARTS Southeast’s wonderful semi-annual magazine, IMPACT. Now three issues deep, each volume acts as a sort of literally and figurative snapshot of where the art culture is locally, with art and essays from some of the most thoughtful creative voices in the region.

Mercifully, they’ve decided not to be open on Black Friday so that everyone can have a well-deserved break and spend extra time with family. But the shop will be open again come Small Business Saturday, Nov. 25th. And for those who just can’t wait, there’s always the online version of the shop at artssoutheast.org/shop.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Think outside the big box and shop local savannah for holidays