Italian ornaments started being imported in 1950, and the Japanese made ornaments, too. Czechoslovakia had a large bead industry, and they made their ornaments out of small beads. Of course, during the world wars, that’s when America started to make its own ornaments.īefore that, everything was imported. That probably began in the 1930s and ’40s. Collectors Weekly: Were American manufacturers making their own ornaments as well?Īrnold: That came much later on. The majority of them were made for export to America. The cardboard has held up extremely well, although the ornaments as a group are relatively rare. Most are either gold or silver, so they almost look like metal when you first see them. The Dresden factories would stamp out the parts, and then cottage workers would assemble the pieces at home. Sometimes they would’ve had a little gift inside, too. They don’t have candy in them anymore, but when they were originally purchased, they would have. There are transportation items, animals, people, household objects, and even candy containers.
You can actually see the fur on the animals, and with some of the birds, you can tell exactly what species they are. When you first see them, they look like celluloid because of all the detail, but they’re actually embossed cardboard. They’re made out of very thin embossed cardboard and they were only made for a relatively short time, from about 1870 to 1910. My favorite items in our collection are the Dresden Christmas ornaments. They probably just had a very high work ethic. I’m fairly certain they never thought these pieces would last as long as they did. They produced unusual things, sometimes very comical. It’s not so much the craftsmanship that attracts us to German Christmas antiques it’s their ingenuity and cleverness, as well as the things they chose to make. They’re from the late 1800s through the 1920s. They seem to be the most creative, and they must be of the highest quality because they’ve lasted so long. We collect from all over the world, but we find the best things primarily come from Germany. We have antique cottons, kugels, figural glass, Sebnitz ornaments, just anything and everything that’s antique. Collectors Weekly: Do you specialize in a specific type of ornament?Īrnold: No, we like everything. We’re not really open to the public, per se. We have friends who come by every year because they like to see what we do, and we belong to a club called The Golden Glow of Christmas Past, so we invite other members to stop by, but we don’t host large groups. If we have a small tree, she’ll put a little village around it with some tiny animals. My wife particularly likes to create little vignettes on the shelves. We don’t have a terribly large house, and with 23 trees, you have to be able to have friends come in and walk around without bumping into them, so we try and do clever arrangements. We take a great deal of time with our displays. I even put some real bird nests inside the branches. We also do a tree with birds and anything bird-related-glass birds, Dresden paper birds, tinsel birds, birdcages. That turned out to be very successful tree. A few years ago, I had this idea to do a blue tree decorated only with blue ornaments, so I started setting aside everything that had blue on it. We put up 23 antique feathered Christmas trees and they all have antique Christmas ornaments.įor a long time, we were very much against doing themed trees, but when you have several thousand ornaments and you’re trying to do something different every year, you eventually have to start doing themed trees. Our collection’s not the biggest or the best, but it’s very nice. Eventually, ornaments became my passion, too. She thought they were wonderful, so she bought them, and that’s been her passion ever since. Recently, Jerry spoke with us and shared his deep knowledge of German Christmas ornaments in the United States and the variety of materials used to make them-from the embossed cardboard ornaments made in Dresden to the wire-strung glass-bead ornaments of Czechoslovakia.Ībout 42 years ago, my wife, Darla, went to a very large white elephant sale and found a box of antique Christmas ornaments. With thousands of antique Christmas ornaments in their collection, it takes almost two-dozen trees just to showcase a fraction of their bounty every year.
Vintage japan xmas snow babies how to#
Jerry and Darla Arnold know how to do Christmas right.
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