At Last The Christmas Decorations Are Up!

Photo: Chronica Domus

I really don't know where December has gone but the month has sped away faster than a Hatton Garden jewel thief.   This year we are staying home for Christmas and hosting overseas house guests who arrive this afternoon.  I am very much looking forward to both enjoying their good company and celebrating Christmas for the first time in four years in my own home.

When one expects house guests at this time of the year there is much to do in anticipation of their visit.  On top of all that, there is a laundry list of tasks to be completed before Christmas day arrives including lots of specialty food shopping for Christmas day dinner, and a few last minute presents. One of the more pleasurable undertakings of the season is tarting up the house.   As we like to keep things simple around here, we avidly adhere to Miss Pole's Yuletide Decorating Philosophy so last weekend we made time to track down our evergreen tree and bring it home.  Patience our teenage daughter was insistent that we select a "fuller" tree.  What she really meant was she would like a species other than my preferred Silver Tip which is gappy by nature and provides ample room between branches to hang my collection of antique and vintage ornaments.  We settled on the Noble Fir you see below.

Photo: Chronica Domus

Norton immediately approved of Patience's choice of tree

(let's hope the ornaments are of less interest to him)

Photo: Chronica Domus

After a battle installing the fairy lights (the upper-most strand decided to die in situ!), a trip to the store was in order to procure a further supply.  This is the sort of tomfoolery that perfectly demonstrates why I have a love-hate relationship with fairy lights.  I would much rather opt to illuminate our tree with miniature candles.  As you can imagine, my husband is horrified by my pyrotechnic flight of fancy so the fairy lights remain.  Ah well, one can always fantasize about such things.

This year's exuberant color palette is a combination of silver, green, pale pink,
raspberry, and orange

Photo: Chronica Domus

Before finding the strength of will to get back to the tree decorating, I decided that adorning the mantelshelf would be a far less taxing experience.  I used the pine cones that Patience and I collected and decorated with frosty glass glitter years earlier when she was still in elementary school, together with clippings from the tree.

Crushed glass glitter provides a seasonal frosty appearance to pine cones that perch 

upon an English Regency slop bowl and cups

Photo: Chronica Domus

Of course there's always room atop the looking glasses and picture frames for a little
seasonal greenery and a pine cone or two

Photo: Chronica Domus

I thought it would be fun to continue the pine cone theme in the dining room.  Below is the ivory colored goose feather tree decked out in ... you've guessed it, pine cones!

Vintage silver glass pine cones adorn the goose feather tree which is anchored in an
old tole container topped off with yet more (green) vintage glass pine cone ornaments

Photo: Chronica Domus

Here's a close-up of the tole container anchoring the feather tree with help from a pile of

vintage glass pine cones in shades of green and gold

Photo: Chronica Domus

Moving to the kitchen next, I simply could not stop myself.  More pine cones and clippings from the Noble Fir tree found a resting spot upon the hanging wall shelf.

Have I gone too far?  What, I wonder, would Miss Pole make of all this pine cone frippery?

Photo: Chronica Domus

Returning to the evergreen tree in the drawing room, Patience was eager to help me hang the hundreds of vintage glass ornaments in place.  We used thin gauge wire instead of ornament hangers to secure each ornament to its bough by wrapping it around the needles.  The extra effort, we hope, will insure the delicate ornaments stay put.  At least that's the idea.

Photo: Chronica Domus

I think the newly acquired old ornaments from the recent sale I attended look splendid upon this year's tree 

Photo: Chronica Domus

Thank goodness the fairy lights are still working now that the ornaments have been hung!

Photo: Chronica Domus

Although it was sunny and bright this morning when I photographed the tree, it was sufficiently chilly that we plan on lighting a fire later today

Photo: Chronica Domus

Patience was thrilled with her choice of evergreen tree, and the cheery colors

of the ornaments, and looks forward to plenty of presents being piled beneath it

Photo: Chronica Domus

I had just a few more pine cones and bits of greenery to fiddle with so here they are, atop the chest of drawers and the looking glass in the drawing room.

Photo: Chronica Domus

Now that the house is dressed for Christmas, I look forward to a few hours of tranquility before driving to the airport to retrieve our house guests. Then, at last, the season's merry making can commence!  

I wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas!

A Christmas Ornament Collector's Fantasy Sale

Christmas arrived early in the Chronica Domus household this year thanks to the 

ornament score of the century

Photo: Chronica Domus

Old-fashioned, blown glass Christmas tree ornaments have held a special place in my heart since childhood.  My mother had a selection of them to decorate the family's Christmas tree along with tinsel and, on occasion, something that to the eyes of a child resembled cotton cobwebs, a rather poor imitation of snow I believe.  When I first started my own collection of vintage blown glass Christmas tree ornaments, way back when I landed on this side of the pond in the early 1990's, I was agog to discover the vast quantities available for the picking.  Collective antiques shops and thrift stores proved to be fertile stomping grounds for the unusual geometric shapes which comprised my collection.  Back then, over-stuffed plastic bags of ornaments could be purchased for a pittance.

Over the years, as more people have discovered the joys of decorating their trees with these beguiling baubles, hunting them down become a challenging sport for me.  Nowadays, it is a happy and increasingly rare day when I score a handful of fragile 1920's German indents or a World War II era pine cone.

With this in mind, you can only imagine how ecstatic I was when my friend Jeannette, a fellow ornament devotee, and I recently attended a sale so extraordinary it was hard to believe we had not conjured it up from our wildest fantasies.  Yes, we really were awake, and this really was the Sale of The Century as far as these things go.  In fact, there were so many items up for grabs that the sale took place over multiple days.  Jeannette and I found it difficult to keep away, and thus we attended not once, but twice.  What lucky girls we were!

Alas, in my dizzy excitement, I failed to take along my camera but if you'd care to see a fraction of the thousands of exceptional and rare items that were on offer, do please visit the blog of Addison Studio Sale where the many photographs included in the links found here, here, and here, will give you a delicious taste of what we saw.

Ron Morgan's fifty year-in-the-making Christmas collection was up for sale and proved to be an ornament collector's wildest fantasy come true

Source 

The collection was amassed over the span of fifty years by Ron Morgan, a well-known local floral designer who recently moved to Mexico.  Mr. Morgan had an unerring eye when it came to the quality and rarity of items included in his collection. The blown glass German ornaments, Dresden cardboard figures, Putz animals and houses, strings of glass beads, goose feather trees, lametta tinsel, Belsnickel Father Christmas figures, candy containers, German glass kugels in all shapes, colors, and sizes, together with an assortment of other Christmas ephemera and novelties really should have landed in a museum, en masse.  I doubt there's another collection quite like it anywhere else in the world.  As it is, Mr. Morgan made many hundreds of keen enthusiasts of Christmas past extremely happy with their recent purchases of items rarely seen on the market.  Below is the selection of the glass ornaments I was fortunate enough to have hauled away from the sale.

Most of these fragile blown glass ornaments were made in Germany in the 1920's and 1930's

Photo: Chronica Domus

These are German kugels and were made in the mid to late-nineteenth century, constructed of heavier glass with stamped brass hangers they are extremely sought after and are a rarity

Photo: Chronica Domus

 I look forward to hanging these whimsical beauties from the boughs of our Christmas tree ...

Photo: Chronica Domus

... alongside these icy beauties

Photo: Chronica Domus

I also had the chance of snapping up two early-nineteenth century blown glass vessels known as fairy lights or lanterns.  I believe these might actually be leech bowls or jars that someone converted into fairy lights with the clever use of a bit of old tinsel.  These cradled small wax candles and helped to cast light on the Christmas tree.  Not particularly safe, I know, but lovely nonetheless.

Hmmm... are these fairy lights or leech bowls or jars I wonder?  

Photo: Chronica Domus

Jeannette and I are so chuffed with our latest Christmas treasures that our thirst for such things has been quenched, at least we think, for now.  On the drive home from the second of the two sales, we revisited the issue of how dire our storage issues have become.  In one fell swoop, things just got a lot worse.  We agreed, however, that at least they had worsened for the very best of reasons, an abundance of beautiful Christmas tree ornaments.  Our latest haul is truly an embarrassment of riches.

What is it that you enjoy decorating your tree with, and do you have a favorite ornament you would like to tell me about?