My parents used to have several examples of unsilvered ornaments dating from the war years.  This red ball is the only one that now survives unbroken.  No metal was used in its production; its cap is cardboard, its hanger, paper string.  The interior lacks a coating of silver nitrate solution that had been standard practice before the war.  Until the end of the 1930s, any glass ornaments adorning American Christmas trees were hand-blown in Germany and imported.  It was evident that the outbreak of World War II would put a stop to this supply.  During this time, the Corning Glass Company began producing clear glass globe ornaments, using a machine intended to make light bulbs.  By 1939, these mass-produced American Christmas balls were available across the country in Woolworth stores.

Like the one pictured above, they were typically made of brightly colored glass and decorated with stripes of opaque, lighter colored paint.  Due to the absence of the silver solution, the ornaments are less sparkly than those produced pre- and post-war.     

This was predominately the type of ornament that hung on the little shrub-like cedar in my grandparents’ house in Kentucky in the 1950s.  My grandfather and uncle usually cut down a tree from somewhere on the farm.  By today’s standards of height, shape and beauty, it would not be considered a fine specimen.  But to my family at the time, it looked exactly the way a Christmas tree should look.  It was an ideal tree:  a homegrown, local, Kentucky cedar.  Certainly no one could say it didn’t have the perfect Christmas tree smell.

In the photo above, taken sometime after my parents’ marriage in 1955, are, from left:  Uncle Bill on the sofa, Daddy, Mama, my mother’s eldest brother Leland, my grandmother, and my grandfather.

Above, Aunt Dessie, Leland’s wife, is in the center, with her husband partially visible behind.  Mama must have taken this photo. 

When I imagine Christmas in Kentucky in the years shortly before my birth, I see these smiling faces and hear their laughter.  I smell that festive cedar smell, and I wonder why anyone would ever choose a tall thin Christmas tree.   

Our family places particular value on the well-seasoned, the tried and true, so it’s not surprising that some of our favorite Christmas ornaments are those that have been with us the longest.  The one that most resonates for Mama is this little cardboard foil-covered stocking.  It’s likely the oldest of all our decorations.  She remembers when her brother Edwin, six years her elder, and only ten or eleven at the time, rode his bike to town and bought it.  All the family decorations were so old, he said; it was time for a few new ones.  The year may have been 1939 or 40.  The foil on the stocking, the shiny gold beads on the chain, and the metal on the attached shiny red ball suggest it dates prior to 1943.  By that year, the war effort had commandeered nearly all metal for military needs. (Mama added the silver and gold star much later, to replace a lost and long forgotten adornment.)

Christmas ornaments, of course, are much more than baubles.  Those we most cherish are talismans that conjure our younger, happier, better selves, perhaps in homeplaces now transformed beyond recognition. They speak to us of beloved family and friends as we’d like them to be. 

So it is that the little silver stocking brings back Edwin as a boy.  At the time, he was my mother’s favorite person in the world.  Wise and witty, with an appreciation for the absurd and the odd, he could inject fun into any situation.  Mama and Edwin saw the world through the same eyes, and she adored him.  He made everything better.  That’s the Edwin Mama remembers with such joy, the Edwin she sees when she hangs his foil-covered stocking on the tree. 

The first of several much-loved Christmas decorations that pop into my mind are these three vintage elves on skis.  Among my parents’ first holiday trinkets, they’ve been a part of my Christmas as long as I can remember.  Mama recalls buying them in the very early 60s during a rare, day-after-Thanksgiving shopping trip to the St. Matthews Mall near Louisville. 

Produced in Japan in the 1950s, the elves have plastic heads with hand-painted, apple-cheeked faces and pointed, flocked-paper hats.  Bodies are pinecones.  In their pipe cleaner arms each holds a musical instrument:  maracas, a paper accordion, or cymbals. Cardboard glitter-coated skis are glued to each pinecone, the elves have no feet.  Apparently they don’t need feet; they’ve managed quite well without them for the past sixty years.  It was comforting to see this merry elf trio displayed prominently on my parents’ tree again this year. 

Decorating the Christmas tree in my childhood home was a much-anticipated event.  We usually picked out a tall Frazier fir, typically well shaped and on the thinner side.  An exception was the bushy long-needled pine we somehow brought home during my Kindergarten year, which I wrote about in 2013.  (See Oh. . . Eww. . . Christmas Tree!) It was sparsely and evidently indifferently decorated.  Why we chose such a tree remains a mystery; that’s a memory my parents and I have blocked.  I suspect we’d rather not think about it, or other memories it stirs up.  Anyway, my recollections of Christmas in Atlanta include a beautiful tree, pleasingly decorated.  It made our living room especially cozy during December.

We acquired more ornaments each year, but we rarely retired any, unless they were broken and hopelessly beyond repair.  We didn’t do themes of color or topic:  no all-pink tree, no Disney tree, certainly no Star Wars tree.  The collection accrued gradually.  Unpacking the same ornaments year after year, then re-packing them in January, they became imprinted on my memory.  Each December I looked forward to unwrapping my favorite ones and finding spots for them on the tree.  I’ve written about the many homemade ornaments my mother and I produced every year.  We turned out multitudes of candy cane horses, tiny Raggedy Anns and Andys, mice in Santa suits, clothespin toy soldiers, pasta angels, etc.  My home and that of my parents are well-stocked with such items.  But there were other ornaments, some homemade, some store-bought, that were one-of-a-kind.  These remain at my parents’ house. 

Since our daughter turned two, it’s been our tradition to spend Christmas here at our home in Virginia.  My parents joined us, until two years ago, when they gave up driving long distances.  They’d rather not fly, so they prefer to stay in Atlanta.  This year Mama told me she didn’t really feel like putting up the tree.  Daddy, especially, would really miss it, but he felt even less up to the task.  It sounded like my cue to fly down for a pre-Christmas visit.  When I realized I could also miss my daughter’s final week of classes before winter break (and all the stress and drama that threatened to entail), it made the decision that much easier.   

So a week ago, I was back in my childhood home, unpacking the many boxes of Christmas decorations my mother had stored so carefully in the attic last winter.  And one by one, I unwrapped all those cherished baubles.  It had been six years since I’d seen them, when we had veered from the usual plan and spent the holiday in Atlanta.  Some ornaments looked nearly as good as new, others showed their very advanced age.  All were as familiar as the faces of dear old friends. 

I’ll share them in a few posts to follow.  They may prompt recollections of treasures from your childhood tree.