Decorating for the holidays—it turns us all into collectors of sorts. The colored lights, the baubles, the ornament your teenager made when she was five and the ones you’ve acquired from around the world, the angel tree-topper that’s been in the family for decades. Just unpacking it all can be a holiday ritual filled with meaning and memories.
But then there are those for whom Christmas ornaments are a year-round endeavor.
“A lot of collecting is what one remembers from childhood,” says Joseph Pecora, who is a member of Golden Glow of Christmas Past, a club for collectors of antique Christmas ornaments. “Younger collectors are nostalgic about what they saw on their trees, so there are collectors who collect plastic Christmas ornaments. Even aluminum trees are collectible, although a lot of people think they’re tacky.”
Pecora, a retired social worker, has been collecting antique ornaments since 1979, when he moved into a Queen Anne Victorian and felt that vintage Christmas decorations would be more in synch with his house. “I have ornaments from the 1890s to the 1940s,” he explains. “The German figural ornaments are my favorites. For the U.S. market, they would design ornaments based on characters Americans knew, like Amelia Earhart holding a little aircraft in her arms and wearing goggles. There were also female heads like Little Red Riding Hood and Lady Liberty.”
Like many collectors, Pecora is not content with putting up just one Christmas tree at a time. “I have one floor-to-ceiling tree,” he says. “I have a six-foot feather tree, and two or three smaller German turn-of-the-century feather trees. Many of these were brought over by German immigrants because you could collapse them, and you didn’t have to chop down a fresh tree every year.”
A highly coveted Dresden Christmas ornament
Another member of Golden Glow is designer and artist Dolph Gotelli, who teaches at UC Davis. He fondly remembers stores like the Emporium, the White House, and especially the old Podesta Baldocchi on Grant Avenue, for the Christmas displays of locally made ornaments and imported Italian glass ornaments. “I have a collection of glass,” he says, “but they’re difficult to find, and some of the old ones are so fragile. So my main emphasis is the paper tree ornaments. I like paper lanterns and paper garlands that spell out Happy Christmas. I also have about eight hundred framed antique prints documenting the Victorian rituals of Christmas.”
Gotelli is especially taken with the old die cuts, which were in vogue from the 1870s to the first decade of the twentieth century. “The technique of printing was wonderful,” notes Gotelli. “Each color was laid out on the paper, giving it a depth that is very hard to find these days. You’d see these elaborate Santas, or typically Victorian things like cats and dogs and children and snow angels. The die cuts were in books, and were then made in the home, framed with tinsel, and hung on the tree. You can still find scrapbooks with wonderful paper die cuts.”
The Christmas ornament most often mentioned by collectors is the Dresden.
Dresden Christmas ornaments, manufactured in Germany from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, are small, three-dimensional pressed cardboard figures, molded into shapes that include animals, birds, ships, bicycles, even horse-drawn sleighs. They are among the most highly prized ornaments among collectors. “You can find a Dresden for $300,” says Lianne Krueger Sullivan, a medical illustrator and college professor in Dallas, who collects and repairs Dresden ornaments. “The more expensive Dresdens have sold in the five to eight thousand dollar range.”
For collectors such as Sullivan, it’s a worthwhile investment that fuels a satisfying passion. “Every time I hold one,” she explains, “I’m amazed by a sense of animation. If you see a backlit Dresden you actually might think it was a horse, carriage, and two riders. It doesn’t have the stilted quality that a lot of sculptures have.
“Dresdens were made at a time when there were many home crafters in Germany. The base ornaments would be created on giant presses at the factory. Then the presses trimmed the ornaments, and the pieces would be given to workers who would take them home, glue them, add the details—tiny reins, seats, flowers, and decorations. They did the hand painting as well.”
The presses and molds used to make these pieces have vanished. “As far as we know, the original presses were melted down during the First World War,” says Sullivan. Few records remain about their fabrication.
Sullivan has set up a website (dresdenornament.info) showcasing the finely detailed beauty of Dresden ornaments as a way of creating a visual record of these precious works in their most original, well preserved state. For Sullivan, as with many antique ornament collectors, these objets d’art aren’t just for the holidays; they don’t get packed away.
“I probably have sixty-five Dresdens,” notes Sullivan. “I keep a small, antique, white decorated feather tree year round. They’re not ornaments to me. They’re sculpture. I have them out of any natural light and away from heat or cooling. But I have them out, because I want to enjoy them.”
