OrnamentTracker
The Ornament AnnualThe birth of the ornamentChapter VII · i
Chapter VII · Part the First

The birth of the ornament

Before an ornament could have a story, someone had to decide a tree should wear one. This is the honest account of how that happened, with the legends labeled as legends.

The tree you could eat

The earliest decorated Christmas trees we can actually document come from German-speaking Europe, and they were dressed from the pantry: apples, gilded nuts, wafers and small baked goods, paper flowers. The decorations were largely edible or ephemeral, consumed or discarded when the season ended. Nothing on those trees was an heirloom. That is the important point, and the strange one: the ornament as a kept object, the thing this whole site is about, had to be invented.

Told as legend: a widely repeated story connects the decorated tree to the medieval "paradise tree," a prop hung with apples for Adam-and-Eve plays performed on December 24th. It is a tidy origin, and it may carry some truth, but the documentary chain between those plays and the parlor tree is thin, and historians treat the connection as plausible tradition rather than settled fact. We pass it along the same way.

Glass enters, and the object begins

The town of Lauscha, in Germany's Thuringian mountains, had blown glass since the sixteenth century. By the middle of the nineteenth, its home workshops were producing kugeln: hand-blown glass spheres, silvered inside to catch candlelight. Unlike an apple or a wafer, a kugel survived the season. It went into a box in January and came out again in December, the same object, carrying another year with it. The heirloom ornament begins there: not with a decree or a legend, but with a material that could last.

Told as tradition: Lauscha lore credits a particular glassblower, usually named as Hans Greiner, with the first kugeln, sometimes with a story attached that he was too poor to hang apples and blew glass ones instead. Greiner is a real and important Lauscha family name, but the too-poor-for-apples story has no period source we can find, and versions of it are told about other makers too. Charming, unverifiable, and almost certainly polished in the retelling.

The moment it became a keepsake

Two things turned the glass ball into the object collectors know. First, export: American five-and-dime retail, F.W. Woolworth's most consequentially, began importing German glass ornaments in the 1880s and sold them by the millions, which put a box of keepable glass into ordinary households on both sides of the Atlantic. Second, memory: once a family owned the same physical objects year after year, the objects started absorbing the years. A bauble bought for a first married Christmas, or the one a child always hung crooked, stopped being decoration. The full industrial story, through Shiny Brite, Hallmark's Keepsake era, and the handmade revival, is told in Chapter I.

"The ornament was invented twice: once in glass, and once in memory."

Everything else in this chapter, from the pickle's suspicious legend to the spider's web to the collectors who keep glass with no Christmas in it at all, descends from that second invention. An object that holds memory will gather customs around it the way a tree gathers ornaments.

Continued in Part the Second, The Christmas Traditions

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