Some Collecting categories for Vintage / Antique Christmas

The 20th Century saw the rise in American glass Christmas tree ornaments. Many companies produced American glass including: Shiny Brite, Premier, Colby, Heidt, Corning, Santa Heim, and others.

Today, the original boxes for these sets of American glass ornaments are sometimes worth more that the ornaments themselves! Boxes of old American glass ornaments from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s that were once considered garage sale "junque" are now highly sought after by many mid-century collectors.

Angels have made their appearance in a myriad of forms of Christmas lights, ornaments, and decorations. From tree toppers to Nativity Scenes, Christmas is not Christmas without a few Angels in the mix! 

The most often seen Angels are the lighted plastic tree toppers produced in quantities during the mid-century period after WWII. Many of these pieces are still in use on family trees today and are often passed down from generation to generation. 

Shown are two 1930s Angels from Marolin in Germany. The Germans produced quantities of beautiful composition pieces in Angel forms for Nativity sets and displays. 

From the first German goose feather trees to mid-century American Visca and modern PVC trees, the artificial Christmas tree has seen many changes over the last century.  These classic trees are the perfect backdrops for vintage and antique Christmas ornaments!

German Belsnickle candy containers are based on the stern, old-style European and Pennsylvania Dutch Santa Claus. These figures were made from pressed cardboard or a pulp paper mixture pressed into molds. Some were just decorations but many were sold as candy containers for hiding candy (inside) for children at Christmas. Today, surviving pieces command great pieces by collectors. The name Belsnickle is derived from "Peltz Nicol" combining the Dutch word for fur "pelt" and the name of St. Nicholas. 

From Sunday School candy boxes to cornucopias to Belsnickles, Christmas candy containers came in a wide variety of styles. Many candy boxes and containers were made in the late 1800s and early 1900s and have amazing beautifully lithographed imagery. 

Celluloid was first used to make toys in the late 1800s. German artisans perfected the art of creating all kinds of novel toys made of celluloid, including rattles and dolls. Around 1900 the Viscoloid Company in Leominster, Massachusetts, was founded and soon became one of America's premier producers of celluloid toys. Christmas items were also made of celluloid including Santas and reindeer figures. These lightweight Christmas pieces are a great collecting category. Just be careful, as celluloid is fragile and also quite flammable!

Legend has it that Saint Nicholas inspired the tradition of hanging stocking by the fire on St. Nicholas Eve or Christmas Eve.  The story goes he dropped three bags of gold down a chimney, to help a poor family, and they fell into stockings hanging by the fireplace to dry. 

Christmas stockings have gone from beloved personal childhood items to an entire category of Christmas collectibles. The early stockings printed on muslin and other fabrics are particularly beautiful and highly treasures by collectors today. The Saalfield Publishing Company located in Akron, Ohio, produced a like of beautiful cloth Christmas stocking prints on muslin that could be cut out and sewn at home. 

In the mountains of the old Czechoslovakia, glassblowing towns flourished in the 1800s. In the town of  Gablonz. now called Jablonec nad Nisou, the glass bead industry flourished. From this came the beloved "Gablonz" beaded Christmas ornaments. Some historians feel these ornaments were created by using up leftover beads by turning them into whimsies. 

From spiderwebs to snowflakes and bells, Gablonz ornaments are one of the more unique areas of collecting old Christmas. 

Dresdens are some of the more beautiful and detailed of all antique Christmas ornaments. Made of pressed/embossed cardboard paper that has been coated with gold or silver foil, these miniature works of art mimic animals, people, transportation vehicles, food, and more. 

Dresdens come in either "flat" styles or three dimensional shapes. They are some of the most sought-after and valuable antique Christmas collectibles.

This striking Christmas ornaments are not true "end-of-day" glass. Instead of mixing different glass colors into a batch to create "EOD" pieces, these ornaments mimic that process with artistic painting techniques. EOD painting has been applied to many different shapes  of ornaments including bells, balls, oval shapes, and shapes resembling sail boats. The detail and quality of the painting determines the price.  Many of the best pieces were made in Lauscha, Germany  in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Antique Christmas ephemera ranges from simple printed holiday image to elaborate lithographed three-dimensional scenes. The storybook quality and bright, vivid colors of many old ephemera pieces makes them the centerpieces of collections. 

Many pieces of ephemera that are collected today began life as store or business advertising. Small paper calendars, given away to good customers, were sometimes stapled to larger, elaborate embossed and lithographed scenes. After the year was over, the calendar could be discarded and the scene kept as a hanging decoration. Other giveaways just had beautiful 3D die-cut scenes and the business name, as seen above in a piece used by California wine wholesaler Theo Gier Co.

The Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains) region in Eastern Germany is an area that, to this day, is known for its wonderful wooden toys and wood-crafted holiday decorations. This niche collecting category includes: Miner figures Bergmann; Pyramids; Floating Angels Schwebeengel; Nutcrackers; and other hand-crafted toys and decorations. Some of these decorations date back to the 1800s and are cherished by collectors today. 

The first electric candles used for Christmas decorations in windows were sold around 1918. In the 1920s electric candles in windows became quite popular as a safer alternative to placing real candles in windows at Christmas. By the mid 1920s, the electric candolier was placed on the market. Soon many of the companies manufacturing Christmas tree lights began offering electric candles. 

After WWII with the advent of injection plastic molds, new plastic candles and candoliers replaced earlier wood and cardboard versions. Many people grew up with plastic electric candles in their homes at Christmas. Today, candles and candoliers are sought-after collectibles , especially the earlier versions. 

One thing to remember about using old electric lighting, some of these pieces are now close to 100 years old. Inspect the electrical cord carefully for frays or breaks before plugging anything in. If the wiring looks old and worn, have an electrician or someone with rewiring expertise rewire the piece for you. And always use a dimmer when lighting old Christmas lights. This helps preserve the life of the lamps and cuts down the amount of heat given off by the old light bulbs.

The first commercial Christmas tree lighting "outfits" were sold around 1903 by General Electric and slightly earlier by several companies in Europe. Early sets were sold in wood boxes and had cords called "festoons" where 8-light strings were hard-wired together with a junction box. Wood boxes made way for generic holly-paper-covered cardboard boxes in the teens. The 1920s ushered in the era of fancier lighting sets in boxes with colorful graphics and the new end-to-end connector where multiple sets could be connected and disconnected from each other with ease. 

Christmas lighting is a vast collecting category that includes not only the boxed sets, but the light bulbs or "lamps" as well. Many collectors choose to display their best sets, in the boxes, unlit on a tree.

Figural light bulbs or "figural lamps" were first made in Europe in the late 1800s. Figurals were sold very early in the United States with General Electric's and Eveready's Christmas tree outfits. Early figurals came in fruit, flower, animal, and other shapes. European figurals were miniature works of art and highly collectible today. Figural lights were also sold for battery sets in lower voltages of 3.5V and 6V, so collectors should be careful not to mix these into strings with higher voltage lamps or they will quickly burn out. 

In the 1920s, Japan took over the figural market with its cheaper milk-glass figurals. Germany and Austria, early producers of extremely beautiful figural lamps, could no longer compete against Japanese figurals. European figural lights, with their beautiful air-brushed and hand-painted details, disappeared from the marketplace after WWII. Japanese milk-glass figurals were marketed heavily after WWII into the early 1960s. 

Kugels were some of the earliest glass Christmas tree ornaments. Kugels can be identified by their heavier glass weight, brass embossed cap and hanging ring. With kugels, the color is (typically) in the glass, although there are kugels where designs like flowers and rings have been painted on the outside. Kugels are also silvered on the inside. 

The earlier kugels, made from the 1860s up to the 1920s, were heavy and thick-walled glass. These are heavy because they were blown in a furnace. Removing the molten glass, placing it on the end of a blow rod, then blowing the glass bubble outside the furnace, did not provide the heat necessary to blow lighter-weight pieces. Later pieces were "blown at the lamp," where the flame's heat was much hotter and concentrated, allowing the glass rod to be blown into thinner, lighter balls.  

Kugels came in free-blown shapes like balls  pears, teardrops, and eggs, and in various mold-blown shapes like ribbed balls and eggs, grape clusters, fruit shapes, and more. Kugel balls can be found as small as 1" in diameter and as large as 17" in diameter. 

With kugels, value is determined on the condition of the silvering, and most importantly, by the color and color/shape combination. Modern kugels have been made and the collector needs to educate themselves to tell the difference between new vs old pieces. To read more about kugels check out Craig's BLOG.

The Japanese created their own version of kugels with the "Kugel-like." These are lighter weight glass pieces where the color is (mostly) in the glass. These early-20th-century ornaments typically have plain or ribbed caps that are found mostly in nickel but sometimes in brass. Kugel-likes are found in ball shapes, pinecones, ribbed and zig-zag patterns and are sometimes confused with real kugels. Amethyst, a very desirable kugel color, was also used for Japanese kugel-likes and the two are very similar in color and hue. 

The light weight and simple design caps are the giveaway as to whether you have a real kugel or a Japanese kugel-like.

If you collect old Christmas you undoubtedly have come across glass beads or ornaments made in Lauscha, the birthplace of the glass Christmas decoration. Some of the most beautiful Christmas "glass" was made in the small town and surrounding areas in Germany's Thuringia region, one of Germany's 16 states that has always had an abundance of just the right materials for glassblowing.

Glass beads for the millinery trade were first made in Lauscha several hundred years ago. These glass beads were eventually adapted for use on Christmas trees, as the custom of erecting a live tree inside a home became more popular. Eventually, larger glass baubles were blown for Christmas use, first with glass hooks and later with metal hangers. 

Frank Woolworth is credited with popularizing  the incredible glass artisans of Lauscha when he began working with distributors in nearby Sonnenberg to import glass Christmas tree ornaments into the United States. Eventually, 100s of thousands of glass ornaments were sold by Woolworth's 5 & 10 stores. 

Today there are still a number of artisans making glass Christmas ornaments in and around Lauscha. While competition has become a challenge with cheaper Asian imports flooding the market, the Lauschans and their neighbors continue the tradition of producing some of the world's finest Christmas glass. Antique German glass is one of the more exciting categories for the collector.

Early plastics such as Bakelite and Harvite were used for Christmas decorations and lights as early as the late 1920s. After WWII, injection-molded plastics arrived in force and many companies began offering new items like electric candles, lighted decorations, and holiday toys and candy containers in plastic. Plastic was advertised as "unbreakable" unlike older decorations and more durable for families with younger children. 

Mid-century plastic holiday items is one of the hottest collectible categories today. 

Many antique Christmas ornaments cherished by collectors today began as homemade pieces put together using lithographed die-cuts and cotton and fabric scraps. 

Many of the ladies' magazines in the late 1800s and early 1900s offered ideas, and sometimes pages of artwork to be cut out, in order for those creative readers to create their own Christmas tree ornaments. 

An entire class of collecting is dedicated to "Pennsylvania homemades," like some of the pieces seen on display above. This style of decoration is credited to the Pennsylvania region and was a popular decoration in the late 19th century and early 20th century. 

Celebrating the red, white, and blue, has been incorporated into Christmas decorations since the days of the patriotic Victorians. In the USA, American flags and the red, white, and blue color theme can be found in everything from glass ornaments, bead garland, Christmas lights, to old patriotic banners, signs, and ephemera. 

Seen above is a portion of a patriotic-themed Christmas tree featuring old German glass, scraps, and real candles.

Whether you call it a putz, a Christmas village, or a Christmas garden, many collectors have some memories of growing up with a "village" or winter scene under their tree. Houses, buildings, trains, fences, figures, and sometimes Nativity scenes are in many of our collections.

Electric trains have been a fixture under Christmas trees for more than 100 years thanks to companies like Lionel, Ives, and others creatively tying in the idea of running trains under the tree at Christmas. 

Many early putz houses and pieces from the 1920s and 1930s are still around today, usually passed down from generation to generation. Of these Christmas village items cardboard houses, many made in Japan in the 1930s to 1950s, have become quite sought after by collectors today. 

Many people who grew up celebrating Christmas probably remember having some form or a Nativity scene in the house or under the tree. Representations of Christ's birth and the Magi arriving bearing gifts have been depicted in artwork for hundreds of years.

The early 20th century saw a rise in popularity of the home Nativity, creche, or manger scene. Figures or plaster, composition, wood or metal, stables in all shapes and sizes, and other accessories like trees and farm animals were sold by chain stores like F. W. Woolworth and others and through catalogs like Sears, Roebuck, & Co. Some Nativities were even made as elaborate 3D scenes from embossed, lithographed paper (as seen above).

Nativity figures were made in many parts of the world with Germany and Italy being well known for their creations of these beloved Christmas decorations. Today, vintage and antique Nativities can be found in many collections, with some collectors owning multiple sets.

We will be adding more collecting categories as time permits. Stay tuned!