The Spinning Santa... and other decorations
We had the same Christmas decorations year after year. Some of them still exist. Baubles for the tree, paperchains for the living room. We didn’t have paperchains as such, not the traditional variety – you know the form, gummed strips of coloured paper linked together. I’m fairly sure we made those at school, but at home the decorations came pre-formed, and usually from Woolworths, who seemed to enjoy a monopoly on festive décor in the 1960s and 70s.
Paperchains or ‘garlands’ as the manufacturers referred to them, were like multi-coloured concertinas: once unfolded, it was quite a job to get them to go flat again when they all came down in January. Around the mid-60s, our mum bought some quite spectacular colourful examples, fully four inches wide, and long enough to stretch from the corner of the living room to the light fitting in the centre of the ceiling. We also had plenty of the traditional honeycomb paper type decorations, one of which we called ‘the boot’ because that’s what it looked like when folded flat. It opened out into the shape of a bell. These are still available to buy today, along with other traditional honeycomb shapes, such as balls and discs.
Decorations like this go back to the turn of the last century, when they were introduced by German-born American businessman Bernard Wilmsen. He’d first employed the honeycomb technique in a range of decorative pop-up books, and in 1916 patented the process, leading to the manufacture of tissue paper bells and balls as festive decorations. Wilmsen was no stranger to Chrismassy stuff: he’d started out producing tinsel using machines of German manufacture, and subsequently branched out into the arena of glass ornaments, which soon caught the attention of Woolworth. Small wonder, then, that it was from Woolies we purchased all our Christmas decorations.
As to tinsel, it goes back as far as circa 1600, around fifty years after the first recorded use of a Christmas tree, a tradition associated with Protestant Christian reformer Martin Luther. Early tinsel was made from shredded silver, no less – a far cry from the cheap foil you’ll find on sale in every garden centre and supermarket today.
Oddly enough, we never seemed to have very much tinsel on our tree back in the 60s, and what we had was of a very meagre and stringy consistency. Our mum wound it around the wire on our Christmas tree lights, and there was never very much left over to use elsewhere. One item that always featured on the tree, and which I still have to this day (illustrated in today’s advent door) is a small honeycomb paper Santa Claus face. Unlike the bell and ball type, this tiny decoration didn’t have to be folded out, although it was made in the same fashion, trimmed with glitter, and with small pieces of paper and a plastic button for his eyes, moustache and nose respectively. It originally hung on a thread, and a favourite game of my brother and myself was to wind up Santa Face and then let him go, so that we could enjoy watching him spin round and round. You might think that, after a few years of such treatment, he’d have long since gone to dust, but apart from losing his thread, he still looks the same as he did five or six decades ago.
Until today, I’d never seen another example and wondered whether, as such an ephemeral item, it might be a unique suvivor. There certainly can’t be many left around. A quick Google search reveals that there are a handful of examples for sale on Etsy, with one seller claiming they were ‘made in Japan’ and asking £33 for a set of five.
Five? What would anybody want with five? There’s only one Santa Claus – and for us, there was only ever one Santa Claus tree ornament. His days of spinning may be over, but he’s back in place on this year’s tree.
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