Hudson’s Bay’s Christmas windows are back at Toronto store

For about 18 years, Grant Slemmestad helped bring one of Toronto’s most cherished Christmas displays to life — the famous holiday windows at Hudson’s Bay’s flagship store.

Every year until 2023, he and the once-venerated retailer’s visual team transformed the Bay’s five windows along Queen Street at Yonge into festive miniature worlds, carefully arranging hundreds of toys and reindeer on moving tracks, scattering sawdust beneath the tiny elves sawing logs, and crawling through fireplaces to adjust the chandelier bulbs.

While many Torontonians, like Slemmestad, feared the festive windows would go dark for good after Hudson’s Bay closed down in June , the defunct retailer’s landlord, Cadillac Fairview, says it will preserve the decades-long tradition this December.

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