ANTIQUES FAIR A touch of festive glass On the trail of collectible festive baubles in the Florida sunshine
IT WAS a family tradition. When the two young apprentices (our children) were young, every holiday we took was not complete until we had found a souvenir capable of doubling up as a Christmas tree decoration.
Each subsequent Christmas, as the four of us dressed the tree with year after year of these found objects, each one jogged happy memories of our holidays of the past and the places we had visited.
My personal favourite was a bejewelled shooting star, its tail of starlight glitter spelling out “felicidad nuevo”, which according to Google Translate means ‘happiness again’. I always thought it meant Happy New Year, but there we are.
The search was always great fun, although not always easy at the height of the summer, which meant that the objects pressed into festive duties sometimes left a lot to the imagination: a sequinned fish from Tunisia; an Indalo man from Mojacar and a furry mouse with overly long ears and tail from Bavaria, to name just a few.
And then we hit the mother lode, sadly long after the apprentices had flown the nest. When fate found us in Florida, we discovered a “Christmas Shop” somewhere in virtually every town we visited.
These glittering establishments sell anything to do with Christmas the entire rear round, but the whole experience of visiting one (and one was enough) was far too much and far too easy. Even Santa would be spinning around the North Pole given how much was for sale.
Instead, we began searching out old Christmas decorations in street markets, swapmeets and fleamarkets (all mostly the equivalent of our carboot sales). The pickings were slimmer but far more collectable.
And then we hit the mother lode – again. Pattiy Hill, who trades as The Old Lady’s Attic, has been buying and selling antiques for 40 years.
Her stand at one of the Florida events we attended was literally covered with vintage Christmas decorations. Among them was the black and white photograph pictured here.
Whether it was staged or not we’ll never know, but it shows a young girl from a clearly affluent family surrounded by an abundance of gifts – doll, doll’s pram, rocking horse, sleigh and much more – strewn around the bedecked tree on Christmas morning. Ours for $6.
The photo probably dates from the
Pattiy’s photo of the little girl with all her gifts. Christopher’s for $6? Photograph: Pattiy Hill
A host of vintage glass Christmas tree ornaments. The black cat is the oldest
A “flock” of vintage bird tree ornaments with spun glass tails
Early 20th century ornaments modelled with faces. One superimposed super on a pear
A rare survivor ivor given its shape, this trumpet was one of the most intricate German ornaments ments made from molten glass straws ws 1950s, but Patti’s Christmas collectables dated from as far back as the Twenties. They were fascinating.
Our favourites were the handblown and painted glass ornaments – one collection was entirely birds, each with delicate spun glass tails – made originally in Germany in the mid 19th century.
They went on sale in the US in 1880s when a German merchant offered to supply them to the young New York proprietor of the equivalent of our £1 shops by the name of Frank Winfield Woolworth (1852-1919).
Rare 1900s ornaments. They were secured by spring clips and used to hold Christmas tree candles
He thought they were foolish fripperies, but many of the customers at his store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, were German immigrants and they reminded them of home where decorated Christmas trees were a strong tradition – you’ll remember that Queen Victoria’s hu husband, Prince Albert, is credited w with bringing the Christmas tree to Britain.
In the event, Woolworth is said to have purchased $25 dollars’ worth and they sold out in two days.
Within 10 years his annual order had grown to 200,000, by which time they were being sold in the then 14 FW Woolworth’s stores. It was only a matter of time before Woolworth became a retail phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic.
The glass ornaments that hung on the Christmas trees when we were children were no doubt purchased over a Woolworth’s counter The ornaments were made originally in Lauscha in central Germany’s Thuringia state, 60 miles from Nuremberg. The town became a centre for glass-blowing in the 16th century when a group of Protestant glass blowers fled there from Swabia, now a part of Bavaria, to escape religious persecution.
They devised a means to decorate the inside of glass beads and balls with lead or zinc mirroring solution to make them shiny. Large early examples can be found today known as witches’ balls which, tradition has it, were intended to hang in the windows of houses to frighten away the evil broomstick-riding women.
In 1857, one of the Lauscha workers, Louis Greiner-Schlotfeger, perfected a silver nitrate formula for silvering that remains in use today. He also built a gas-powered factory that could heat molten glass with a steady, adjustable flame.
This enabled workers to blow ornaments with paper-thin walls light enough to be hung together with little or no effect on their host.
“WeihnachtsbaumKugeln” – Christmas tree balls – were born.
By 1880, FW Woolworth were selling full-sized trees decorated with the then expensive imported German o ornaments. By the 1900s, intricately shaped wooden and papier maché moulds allowed glass to be blown into them to produce sculpted ornaments. They varied from pine cones to fruit, vegetables, fish and fowl, in bright red, cobalt, blue, green, silver, gold, and amethyst to decorate trees throughout the world.
A range of novelty items shaped like pocket watches, smokers’ pipes and those representing the technological marvels of the era such as aeroplanes and automobiles followed, but German ornaments were subsequently undercut by cheaper, less detailed examples produced in the French glass manufacturing centre of Nancy.
This presents a problem for the would-be collector. Quality counts, however, and it does not take long to discern good from average when examples from each manufacturing centre are placed side by side.
Value is also dependent on age and rarity (how many did you smash last time you decorated your childhood Christmas tree?).
More of a problem are the new ornaments being mass-produced in China and India. One clue helps: German makers invariably “snipped” the neck of their ornaments with a blowing iron flush or close to its surface while the glass was still in its molten state.
Cheap copies produced elsewhere have longer “stems” with a jagged end where the ornament has been snapped off. And don’t trust the caps and wires, they have been pre-rusted and “antiqued” to look old.
So why can so many vintage Christmas ornaments be found in America? Because they have a far stronger following among collectors there. When long-forgotten boxes of vintage decorations are found, their value is recognised and they are saved and enjoyed.
That has yet to happen in the UK, where dealers and collectors too often assume they are not valuable and are too fragile to bother with.
The time will come, however.