Collecting Christmas Ornaments

by Sandra Lee Smith
(CA)

Starting a collection of Christmas ornaments was never on my radar; rather, it was something that just evolved.

The first Christmas Jim & I were married, we hardly had any ornaments at all. I found a few old glass ones buried in a box in his mother’s basement and bought a few more, at Newberry’s in downtown Cincinnati, after work a few times in December.

I also bought plaster of Paris Creche figurines (for about 20c each) which, after 50 years, are still on display every Christmas. When my sons were little boys they loved to play with the little figures. One year we couldn’t find St Joseph and had to have a Wise Man stand in for him.

When my sons began coming along, I started buying little ornaments with their names imprinted on them and as time went by, I began buying Hallmark ornaments. But my real treasures are the boxes of old glass ornaments that I have found, from time to time, in antique stores or even thrift shops.

But the collection began to grow by leaps and bounds in a most unexpected way - I discovered that, whenever I traveled somewhere, I could almost always find Christmas ornaments. They make the best souvenirs of all! I even found one in Hawaii.

It’s an added plus if you visit a city and find there is a Christmas store there, just waiting to be explored. I have found Christmas stores in the most unexpected places - from Atlanta, Georgia, to Carmel, California.

The one in Carmel was the absolute favorite of my sister Becky and I. Local crafters make different kinds of ornaments for the trees which are on display throughout the year. Mine have always been the elaborate clothespin dolls and the felt ornaments. One time I asked the owner if they would take a check.

“Of course,” she said “Christmas people don’t cheat!” - I have never forgotten that remark.

But Christmas tree ornaments don’t even have to be really ornaments - my trees are festooned with dried corsages from class reunions, bookmarks, other things that penpals and friends have made for me over the past fifty years.

It’s an added bonus when something else you collect can be found ornament-size - such as lighthouses. Now I have so many lighthouse ornaments, they fill a 4 foot tree that we put up in the bay window in the dining room.

Needless to say, the collection of ornaments has grown… and grown… and grown. NOW we are putting up eight trees for Christmas - two 7’ ones in the living room, one 7’ one on the front porch, that 4’ tree in the dining room, three little trees in the kitchen (two with all kitchen theme ornaments, one with cardinal ornaments in my sister Becky’s memory) - and one little tree down in the den just for good measure.

It can take us up to two weeks to get everything up. (It only takes about four or five days to get it all down…I often spend New Years Day dismantling trees while watching the Rose parade. Here in California it plays over and over on a local station.

One year I decided to set aside all the angel ornaments and hang them from garlands over the fireplace and sliding glass doors. We have a sizable collection of angel statues of various sizes - those go alongside the fireplace mantle with the crèche in the center. It was a startling discovery to find out how many angels there are - I call them our choir of angels.

My sister Becky loved to give ornaments as Christmas presents to just about everyone. But she would write, with a felt tip marker, on the backs of her ornaments, her name and the year. After she passed away in 2004, and I began assembling my first cardinal tree in her honor, it was a bittersweet discovery to find how many cardinals she had given to me that had her name and the year written on them. Now the cardinal tree has a place of honor over the kitchen sink.

Over the years, I have reduced the collection from time to time, giving boxes of ornaments to my sons when they got married. I also give ornaments as gifts, quite often.

My favorites, I guess, are those that have been made specially for me--some by little childish hands a long time ago.

And how many ornaments are there? You may wonder. One year we actually counted them - for decades I always had a big Christmas party. (It’s only been in the past few years that I had to give that up).

We counted the ornaments and wrote down the number and then invited our guests to write down their guess on a piece of paper and put it into a jar by the door. That was more than 10-15 years ago and there were over a thousand, back then. The person coming closest would win - what else? A brand new ornament!

Many more Unique Christmas Ornaments Here!