While taking down our Christmas tree this past weekend, I decided to take pictures of my vintage ornaments before putting them away. Over the next several days (weeks?) I’ll be posting pictures and any info I feel like adding about my collection of vintage Christmas ornaments. I won’t post every single ornament, but I’ll include quite a few of them. I also hope to post more about my much bigger collection of vintage Christmas postcards, and I may get into some of my other collections and treasures as well (socks, books, music). But I’m starting off with what gave me the idea–the ornaments.

In general, I collect what I like. I’m not looking for the most valuable items or necessarily for a particular manufacturer or artist. Instead, I’m looking for what appeals to me–and in the case of vintage ornaments, they have to be genuinely old, not reproductions. I think most of my vintage ornaments are from the 1930s-1950s. Perhaps someone with a lot of knowledge in this area will come upon these posts and tell me more about what I’ve got (and also let me know if I have any misinformation).

Just because, I’ll start with the stripes. Some of these are a bit newer–50s and 60s. I’ll share some older ones in future posts. The clear–or unsilvered–ones may be from the 40s. The story goes that during WWII metals were needed for the war effort, so Christmas ornaments produced during this time were made with unsilvered glass.

This next one seems older. The glass is heavier and sort of frosted and it shows a different sort of wear.

This next one also seems older to me. It’s a bit smaller than many, and something about the glass and the way it’s worn makes me think it’s older.

I love the colors of the one below.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 11:24 pm and is filed under christmas, collections, me and my brain, nostalgia, photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.