TAMPA \u2014 At this bar, it’s easy to get into the holiday spirits.<\/p>\n
Joy Bar has the usual decorations: Christmas lights, even a Santa. And the establishment stays open Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the catch: the d\u00e9cor never changes.<\/p>\n
Liquor Depot owner Trey Lawson converted the dive bar to a year-round holiday haven. Around this time of year, he sees an uptick of boozy business when patrons want holiday drinks while wearing ugly sweaters.<\/p>\n
Lawson took over the combined Liquor Depot and dive bar from his father in 2018. When he crunched the numbers, he found the dive bar was barely profitable. He considered blowing out the wall and converting the space into a larger liquor store. But a pre-COVID trip to Orlando with his wife changed his mind.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe went to Frosty\u2019s, an all-the-time Christmas bar that unfortunately didn\u2019t survive,\u201d Lawson said. \u201cBut I remember walking in and being like, \u2018This is fun.\u2019<\/p>\n
It’s silly and tacky. \u2026 And it kind of popped back in my mind. And I was like, \u2018I’m going Christmas.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
While Lawson calls it a \u201ccrazy concept,\u201d to embrace, he\u2019s not someone obsessed with Christmas. He\u2019s a fan of the holiday, and many of the movies the dive bar references, but he doesn’t necessarily consider it a personal passion.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just kind of thought it would be fun and different and something that Tampa didn’t have,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve never been asked what my favorite (Christmas movie) is, but I like \u2018Elf.\u2019 That\u2019s a good one. I need to get a Buddy (The Elf) for the bar.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lawson originally planned to install a projector to show Christmas classics on a loop. But since it is still a dive bar, most people want sports anyway.<\/p>\n
He said that since it is a neighborhood watering hole, there are still plenty of regulars. But in December \u2014 as well as \u201cChristmas in July\u201d \u2014 there are plenty of new faces. Joy Bar will run promotions all month: Anyone wearing a Christmas sweater in December gets a free Fireball shot.<\/p>\n
While it’s always Christmas season at Joy Bar, Lawson said he wanted it to remain a dive bar, especially in price.<\/p>\n
\u201cUltra cheap where we have $4 Tito\u2019s and $3 for High Noon\u2019s,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He also wanted the bar\u2019s bourbon selection to stand out.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would go into bars and restaurants, being a big whiskey guy myself, and I would try something and they’re like all right $50 for an ounce,\u201d Lawson said. \u201cI was like this is ridiculous, I know what this bottle cost, I know exactly how it comes out. So (I wanted this place) being super cheap, being focused on the bourbon selection, and then just being fun and being different.\u201d<\/p>\n
Different being always in the Christmas spirit, even when Lawson channeled his inner Clark Griswold and stapled the thousands of blinking lights to the ceiling himself.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know, we have the neighborhood crowd coming all the time, and then with social media, we\u2019ve had some videos go viral and people share them and then we have a whole bunch of new faces for the holiday season,\u201d Lawson said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was 100% a crazy concept that I wanted to do,\u201d he said, \u201cAnd if it didn’t do well, which I was actually not expecting it to, but I was okay with it if it didn’t. I knew it would be super fun though. It was going to be unique, so I sat in that bar with a staple gun for more hours than I can count.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd we got through the (first) holiday season and here we are just weeks before Christmas.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TAMPA \u2014 At this bar, it’s easy to get into the holiday spirits. Joy Bar has the usual…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75581,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[42790,276,42791,387,135,137,136],"class_list":["post-75580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-dive-bar","tag-hillsborough-county","tag-joy-bar","tag-liquor-depot","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75580\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}