Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 6

 

A load of old baubles...

Look at any set of images online, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that Christmas baubles are like snowflakes: no two are the same. This was certainly the case in the days when such items were decorated by hand, but even then manufacturers usually had a few design templates to follow. The earliest examples were spheres or teardrops of hand-blown and painted mercury glass, sometimes decorated with glitter, but despite their extremely fragile nature, they can survive for decades, through the simple fact of being brought out only once a year. I still have many of the same baubles that my mum and dad bought back in the very early 60s.

Baubles are often extremely tacky in appearance, with manufacturers often running to excesses of decoration. For me, there’s a kind of happy medium, where the design is just enough to look attractive without being over the top. And ideally, they’ll want to have a kind of vintage flavour. The best way to get this is to buy vintage, which can be an expensive proposition. 

As mentioned in a previous post, Woolworth’s was the prime place to buy Christmas decorations, although all good department stores would have offered a large selection. You can spot those old Woolies’ baubles a mile off, assuming the original box is still present. It was a simple lidded affair of white cardboard, divided up inside into nine or twelve sections in which the baubles sat like eggs, protected by tissue paper. Our Christmas baubles became like old friends: there were three specific designs in the set – the first were matt white spheres whose lower halves had been dipped in shiny coloured lacquer – gold, red or blue. Above this came a row of hand painted dots and stripes, and the lacquer, when dried, was decorated with various flourishes. The second type again came in three colours – pink, pale blue and pale green, and were decorated with star patterns, some of them outlined in gold glitter – very 1950s. The third type, which were my favourites, were large white spheres encrusted in white glitter, with small indentations highlighted in shiny coloured lacquer. Several of the old baubles have long since gone to dust, the earliest casualty being the 'blue star' bauble, victim of the cat’s attack on the Christmas tree circa 1964. Fragments of it could still be found in the bottom of the box many years later. Around ten years ago, I found a replacement on eBay, but to say it’s fragile is a decided understatement. There’s a small hole in the glass, revealing exactly how thin it is. I mentioned eggshells above, but this is of an even finer consistency, something like 0.05mm compared with the 0.3mm of a typical eggshell…

Our earliest tree decorations also included a number of ‘indent’ baubles, usually teardrop-shaped, which had large shiny concavities on their surface. Getting these to face front is always a challenge when decorating a tree. Sadly, Binkie (the cat) did for all of them, which is a shame as I found them particularly attractive.

To me, those old decorations became iconic, and I would sometimes spot examples on other trees when we went visiting friends or relatives, noting interesting (to me) variations in colour and design. Our primary school put up a Christmas tree in the hall, which included some miniature versions of the white baubles I liked so much. It took me years to find an example.

Vintage baubles are very popular on eBay and Etsy, but buying them comes with the hazard of transportation. Fine if the seller is local and you can pick up yourself, but hardly ideal if the baubles have to be sent out by mail.

Today’s sets have limited appeal to me, although I occasionally look out for any retro styles that hark back to the 50s or 60s. Around 1980, I was pleased to discover a brand new set that were a perfect match for the old ‘star’ design and had clearly been copied from the original, but these proved to be a one-off. Colour-themed trees have become popular in recent years, and whilst these can look extremely attractive if done well, a properly vintage tree should follow no particular colour scheme – gold, red, blue, green, white, anything goes. But of course, it’s all a matter of personal taste. I find our old Christmas decorations nostalgic because I grew up with them – but one man’s nostalgia is, to another, merely just a load of old baubles...

Some of the vintage decorations on this year's tree: the blue and gold star designs look like they came from the same set but were in fact purchased nearly twenty years apart.