Vintage Christmas Decorations and Collectibles
A Wonderful Life: How Postwar Christmas Embraced Spaceships, Nukes, Cellophane
By Lisa Hix — When I was kid in the 1980s, I assumed everything I knew about Christmas had existed since the beginning of time. So it was strange to grow up and realize that only 10 percent of my concept of Christmas came from ancient history—the story of Jesus’ birth, the myth of a winter gift-giver leaving treats in footwear, and the transposing of the Nativity story onto pagan traditions such as putting up an evergreen tree. Another 30 percent of my Christmas beliefs were just 160 years old,...
The War on Christmas Cards: Dead Robins, Used Paperclips, and Other Secular Greetings
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — At the end of 1843, when most good Victorians were commemorating the season by dutifully drafting hand-written letters to their colleagues, friends, and relatives, Henry Cole was working out a way to avoid all this sentimental drudgery. As a prominent public servant and supporter of the arts with a busy social calendar, Cole’s address book was filled to the brim, and writing lengthy notes to all those esteemed contacts was getting more time-consuming every year. "Christmas was as much a...
Fraternizing With the Enemy: The Christmas Truce of 1914
By Ben Marks — This year marks the centennial of the Christmas Truce of 1914, in which pockets of German, British, and French troops along the Western Front laid down their arms to share cigarettes, bury their dead, and sing Christmas carols—in some places for a few hours, in others for several days. Between July 28, 1914 and November 11, 1918, World War I claimed upwards of 20 million lives. As a small pause in the carnage, the Christmas Truce was a fleeting moment of humanity amid unimaginable...
Losing Ourselves in Holiday Windows
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — As the deadline approaches for ordering last-minute gifts online, most of us must finish our Christmas shopping the analog way—walking into stores and picking things out by hand. If you're lucky enough to live in a city with an old-fashioned department store, you might get a glimpse of their fantastic holiday displays, packed full of animated elves and artfully piled gifts. But in most places, such scenes are extinct, remaining only in childhood memories. "Nostalgia has always been...
Will the Real Santa Claus Please Stand Up?
By Lisa Hix — We always think of Santa Claus as an incredibly old man—positively ancient—but the fact is, he’s exactly 150-years-old, born in 1863. Indeed, we might be thinking of Santa’s predecessor St. Nicholas, who is far older, believed to have been a Turkish Greek bishop in the 300s. But the first European winter gift-bringer is even more of a geezer, going back to ancient Germanic paganism and the Norse god Odin. When he wandered the earth, the deity disguised himself as a bearded old man wearing a...
Happy Kids on Christmas Morning
By Lisa Hix — It's easy, as an adult, to get bogged down in the un-fun, stressful aspects of Christmas. The mall becomes a madhouse that empties your wallet. Meals have to be planned and cookies baked. The house has to be decorated, inside and out, cards must be sent, and presents need to be wrapped. And that's not to mention all the tension and drama that can arise when family members come together. But most of us, if we dig deep enough into our photo albums, can find evidence of a time when Christmas...
Vintage Wisdom: Have an Old-Style Christmas
By Veronica Cizmar — Theme No. 1: An Emily Post Dinner Party Let us, for the moment, consider an Emily Post vintage Christmas. Ms. Post, with her irascible wit and no-nonsense approach to etiquette, provides in immense detail, how to give a perfectly elegant dinner party. Here is an excerpt of her rules: "” To live up to Ms. Post's impeccable standards, polish your finest antique silverware and bring out your best Waterford crystal. Don a gorgeous 1930s evening gown or dapper tuxedo tails. Converse as...
The Charms of Christmas Ephemera and the Changing Face of Santa Claus
By Maribeth Keane and Jessica Lewis — I grew up in a home without any antiques. As a small kid, I started decorating my parents’ home for Christmas. I don’t know what influenced me, perhaps being alone and living in a rural environment might have had something to do with it because I engaged in a lot of fantasy play. I made a lot of ornaments out of stuff that I had lying around, and I decorated using things that I found in the garden. Through the years, I became more interested in Christmas decorations and met a few...
Vintage Christmas Ornaments, From Cardboard Dresdens to Silvered Kugels
By Maribeth Keane and Jessica Lewis — About 42 years ago, my wife, Darla, went to a very large white elephant sale and found a box of antique Christmas ornaments. She thought they were wonderful, so she bought them, and that’s been her passion ever since. Eventually, ornaments became my passion, too. We’ve been collecting for 42 years now. Our collection’s not the biggest or the best, but it’s very nice. We put up 23 antique feathered Christmas trees and they all have antique Christmas ornaments. For a long time, we were very...
A Guide to Christmas Antiques and Vintage Christmas Decorations
By Eric Beeson — Ever wonder about that box of vintage Christmas decorations in the attic? From wooden nutcrackers to glass Christrmas tree ornaments to 1930’s Lionel model trains, this article can help you identify what vintage or antique Christmas items might be in that box. Your cherished decorations might be valuable, and even if not, you can sure have a whole lot of fun decorating with them! Christmas Trees: From Simple to Space Age Decorating the tree, like many modern Christmas traditions, was...
A History of Dimestore Christmas Village Houses
By Theodore Althof — The following is a history of these wondrous little artifacts called cardboard Christmas village houses - a history devoted to establishing some way of categorizing them and putting them into chronological perspective. It's a tall chore, because these were small-change notions, not expensive nor considered serious enough to impart model numbers, cataloging, and so forth by those who made them. Even the cheapest 59-cent Christmas light sets had numbers collectors could refer to. Not so the...