Each year we set up our tree and I decorate it with ornaments I have collected over the years. The enjoyment of this ritual has been resurrected with the arrival of our grandchildren. While for now, they are young and simply see the magic of the tree, soon they will be old enough to help decorate it. Some of the ornaments are from when our children were young. Some are from my childhood and many are from my parents and grandparents. In that sense, the fully dressed tree becomes a record of family memories.
Someone commented that one of the ornaments looked like an orange. That connection had never occurred to me, but looking more closely I could see it. This lead to a question about the origin of these ornaments, both in terms of where my grandparents got them and the tradition of ornaments themselves. This investigation took me down a path of the history of the Christmas tree and ornaments.
In 1419, a guild in Freiburg put up a tree decorated with apples, flour-paste wafers, tinsel and gingerbread. Decorating a tree indoors, with paper roses, candles, nuts, and fruits, dates back to Strasbourg, 1605. German immigrants introduced the tradition to America in the 18th and 19th centuries. Initially rejected by Puritanical groups for its pagan origins, the practice gradually gained acceptance. Early American ornaments were crafted from available materials, such as fruits, nuts, popcorn, cranberries, and paper streamers, showcasing inventiveness and resourcefulness.
The first glass ornaments, known as Kugels (meaning balls but often called baubles in English), were developed in and around Lauscha, Germany, in the 1840s. These ornaments ranged in size from one to 18 inches and were crafted by families involved in blowing, silvering, painting, and capping the ornaments. Hans Greiner began producing glass ornaments, whose style was inspired by the shapes of fruits and nuts.
In the mid-1920s, Max Eckardt and his brother Ernst, established a factory in Oberlind Germany (near Lauscha). Recognising the growing American demand for Christmas decorations, he set up his own line of ornaments in New York, branding them under names like Shiny Brite and Max Eckardt & Sons. During the 1930s, Max Eckardt and F.W. Woolworth collaborated with Corning Glass Company to adapt their glass ribbon machine for mass-producing ornaments. This innovation marked the beginning of large-scale ornament production in the United States.
Christmas ornaments embody a wide range of symbolism: stars representing the Star of Bethlehem; flowers to represent new life and beauty; bells to signify joy, celebration and the announcement of Christ’s birth and by the 19th and early 20th centuries oranges were popular, symbolizing luxury and abundance.
Colours also played a symbolic role: red, associated with love, warmth, and protection, as well as the blood of Christ and His sacrifice; gold, symbolising wealth, light, and divine presence, gold also recalls one of the gifts of the Magi. The design of ornaments also conveyed meaning, including: reflective surfaces symbolise spiritual illumination and joy; the circular shape of ornaments signifies eternity, unity, and wholeness; and the reflective indentation, with a pattern that resembles a starburst, flower or fruit, binds together the symbolism of reflection and the specific pattern used.
Looking more closely at the ornaments from my grandparents many are unlabelled, or labelled either West Germany, Japan, and USA. The West German and Japanese ornaments are probably circa 1949-1960 and the American ornaments are probably from the 1930-40s. The unlabelled ornaments are probably pre-1930s1 and of German in origin. Lauscha is just 20 km from Sonneberg, from where my grandparents emigrated in 1929. So it is conceivable that they carried some ornaments with them.
I will make this assumption and treat them with due care.
- The Tariff Act of 1930, 19 U.S.C. §§ 1202-1681b, required nearly every item imported into the United States to disclose the item’s country of origin to the “ultimate purchaser,” ↩︎
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