Seasonal souvenirs
Collectibles add fun, fascination to joy of Christmas
Santa fills stockings, but Christmas fills closets.
Christmas turns practically everybody into a collector of something: the holly-patterned china that Grandma saved so carefully, keepsake ornaments, last year’s wrapping paper and whoknows-where-they-came-from, chipped but never questioned Santa Claus coffee mugs.
Yes, Virginia, and here’s proof. The Container Store alone sells almost a dozen kinds of Christmas storage boxes.
Treasures and trinkets emerge from high shelves, basements, garages and attics to festoon another year’s festivities. And Santa brings more, another year’s sleigh-load of instant collectibles — 10 new ornaments from Hallmark among the latest.
Precious Moments figurines. Snowbabies. Coca-Cola Christmas bottles. McDonald’s Happy Meal toy penguins.
“Everything is collectible to the right person in the right market,” antiques dealer Mary Cameron says at Crystal Hill Antique Mall in North Little Rock. Collectors pay from a dollar to a dither.
The price of a coffee drink buys a tree sparkler from the time of “I Like Ike” and Howdy Doody. But Cameron once sold a belsnickle — German Christmas antique — for $600.
True antique decorations evoke Christmas as it was more than a century ago — the way Charles Dickens knew Christmas. Much of today’s brand-new Christmas decor, as well, harks back to the candle lights and carriage rides of Victorian England.
But even as Dickens set pen to his tale, A Christmas Carol, in 1843, people yearned for the more old-fashioned Christmases of years gone by. The Ghost of Christmas Past returns Dickens’ miserly Ebenezer Scrooge to about the time when a real-life Mr. Fezziwig named Davies Gilbert set about saving
his idea of the jollier past.
Gilbert missed the songs that he remembered as the “delight” of his childhood. He brought back his favorites in the book he published in 1822, Some Ancient Christmas Carols. The book’s title chants on: With the Tunes to Which They Were Formerly Sung in the
West of England. By Dickens’ time, the book had become a collectible.
Most of Gilbert’s favorites have been forgotten again (“Let All Who Are to Mirth Inclined”). But Christmas has been steeped in the peppermint tea of nostalgia ever since.
“It’s a link to the past,” Cameron says. She keeps a permanent showcase devoted to antique and vintage Christmas collectibles, “vintage” meaning about 50 years old.
“Christmas is year-round,” she says.
People come looking for things they remember, things they once had and lost — for childhood, maybe, or the next best thing.
For a child of the ’50s, nothing so defined the season as that brand-new achievement of futuristic thinking, the aluminum Christmas tree. The shiny tree came with a “color wheel,” a light that beamed changing colors. Red and green, blue and yellow reflected off the branches.
Today’s collector can expect to pay into the hundreds for an old-as-granddad, good-as-new aluminum tree, according to the latest Kovels’ Antiques and Collectibles Price Guide (Black Dog and Leventhal).
“Every year, somebody calls wanting to know if we have any aluminum trees,” Cameron says. “Last year, we sold three in one day.”
LET IT SNOW VILLAGE
Christmas collector Larry Handley’s focus is around 1900 to 1950 or so: the half century depicted in his collection of 300 Snow Village miniatures.
Snow Village is a line of collectible decorations, little shops and houses, ongoing with new additions for almost 40 years from a Minnesota-based company called Department 56.
Handley credits his thencollege-age daughter, Hope, with starting the collection. His wife, Cathy, he says, “allows me to have it.” She even buys new pieces for it, he says, along with keeping up her own collections of thimbles and Abingdon pottery.
He added model trains. The collection outgrew the basement of the Handleys’ home in Eureka Springs, and he had his eye on the dining room.
“My wife said no,” he says, and off he went in search of another place to set up his streets and houses, shops, diners, accessory cars and villagers, even a hot-dog stand.
Now the Handley Snow Village display is a yearly tradition for the Eureka Springs Historical Museum. Trains, trolley and all, the village is on annual display through Dec. 23 at Gaskins Switch Village, billed as the South’s largest Snow Village collection.
Semiretired from the U.S. Geological Survey, Handley shops year-round for Snow Village bargains on eBay. A detailed inventory list helps him avoid duplications.
The Snow Village goes back into storage after Christmas, he says, but while it’s out — “Ooo! Ahh!”
“Growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, we didn’t have very much,” he says. Christmas was the year’s big event, “and I’m still a kid when it comes to Christmas.”
SANTA’S LOAD
Advent calendars are collectible. Bells are collectible. Candy tins, dolls, electric candles, feather trees and garish garlands — all these make the listings in the Official Price Guide to Christmas and Other Holiday Collectibles (House of Collectibles). Victorian vases, too. And wreaths.
Santa is a category all to himself. Specialists narrow him down to, say, just the boots: old papier mache boots, plastic candy-container boots, salt and pepper-shaker boots.
Kitschmasland!: Christmas Decor From the 1950s to the 1970s (Schiffer) by Travis Smith tells how to gather up whole decades.
From the ’50s, for example: Shiny Brite glass ornaments. From the ’60s: beads and bangles that appeared all the more sophisticated as viewed through a martini glass. From the ’ 70s: tree ornaments that looked like disco balls.
All along, much of the great American Christmas came from Japan. Japanese novelty makers took their best guess at what Christmas was all about, and produced tons of little cardboard houses swathed in goopy glitter. Brown-looking snowmen with red pin noses. Santas with creepy, strange blue and disturbingly smeared eyes. Santa overdid the mascara.
Dime-store cheap at the time, these things are highly collectible to “new generations of admirers,” Smith writes. The marking “M.I.J.” (made in Japan) holds “a very special meaning,” too, now that Christmas comes from China.
Made-in-Japan ornaments tend to be at least 40 years old — more the makings of an old-fashioned Christmas.
HOME FIRES BURNING
Christmas piles up more travel miles than a flying reindeer. But Arkansans can find Yule-tidy things to collect right at home:
The Arkansas Razorback is naturally Santa’s favorite color, red. Famous for carrying the ball at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, the hog runs wild with Christmas balls, too. He is emblazoned on tree ornaments and Santa hats, even gift tags.
The team’s online store, shop.arkansasrazorbacks.com, lists more than 100 collectibles related to Christmas — some to be found in other souvenir shops around the state.
Each year since 2004, the Arkansas secretary of state’s office issues a collectible Christmas ornament for sale in the state Capitol gift shop and online. (More information is available at sos.arkansas.gov.)
The tradition began during Secretary of State Charlie Daniels’ administration, Capitol Historian David Ware says. Each year’s $19.50 ornament is etched and enameled brass, and comes with a leaflet that tells about the design.
“This year, the Capitol’s ornament combines two of the officially designated state symbols,” Ware says: “the mockingbird, our state bird, and the apple blossom, our state flower.”
BAUBLE LIGHTS
Christmas plates are among the most popular Christmas collectibles, along with various sorts of figurines and tree ornaments, according to eBay, the Internet auction site.
Porcelain maker Bing & Grondahl claims to have turned out the first Christmas plate (a dinner plate too good for mashed potatoes), dated 1895.
Hummel figurines have been around so long, 80 years, they have their own collector’s book: the 432-page Official M.I. Hummel Price Guide (Krause).
Christopher Radko ornaments come with the tale of a toppled tree. The designer’s Christmas tree fell over, according to company lore, forcing him to replace 1,000 glass ornaments. Finding none that he liked, he started making his own for collectors including Oprah Winfrey and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Other tree ornaments go as well in collections outside of Christmas.
For comics collectors: Batman.
For science fiction collectors: Star Trek’s Mr. Spock doing a mind-meld with an alien blob called the Horta.
For music collectors: Frank Sinatra.
The song that says it all for Christmas collecting is a tune (recorded by Spike Jones in 1948) as performed by everybody from George Strait to The Chipmunks, “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.”
But don’t believe it, Santa. Give this kid two teeth, and he’s going to want the whole set.