Snowball lights. “They’re white, 'till they light”
Round, colored lightbulb covered with styrofoam pellets. When you light them up, the underlying color shows through.
All of the homemade ornaments.
psst… like this?
here’s another, much more overpriced
I’m hoping that you folks don’t mind that I’m reading this thread while trying to change my memories.
When I was a kid, Christmas meant strangers with drugs, people touching me and all sort of bad things. shakes memories off. When I was stationed in Okinawa, I was given a wonderous hello kitty Christmas bulb, so I started putting a tree up just for the bulb.
She didn’t alternate monochromatic ornaments, but my Grandmom also had an aluminum tree & color wheel.
That & the bubble lights.
Ohh—you just made me think of “Nanny,” my maternal grandmother! She was an amazing woman who lived to be almost 101 years old. She didn’t have much in terms of material possessions, but she did have the coolest Christmas decorations. I remember the BUBBLE CANDLES. wish I could find the same kind again
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Making snow by whipping Ivory Snow and water with an eggbeater and putting it on the branches of the tree. Wish I could do that now but the formula has changed so it doesn’t whip up any more.
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Old style Christmas lights. I’m a bit too young to remember the really old Mazda C6 lights; we still had some when I was a little kid, but didn’t use them. The ones I remember are the C7s, especially the pink ones.
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Making chains out of construction paper to hang on the tree.
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Ornaments like these. I still have some of the ones from my folks and have been fortunate enough to find some at yard sales.
People pay upwards of THIRTY BUCKS for those ornaments? My parents have a bazillion of them and my mother hates them–she says they look cheap and awful. Most of them are inherited from my grandparents, or my parents bought them when they were just married and couldn’t afford anything nicer. In fairness, some of them are truly hideous–magenta and bronze, with white decorations, and other garish colours–but I should tell them that they’d be worth big bucks now.
I put them on the tree because I love having a really colourful tree–coloured lights, bright ornaments, and tinsel, put on the correct way–strand by strand on every branch!
Lionel Trains. Used as decoration 'round the tree.
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I like them. We have exactly twelve!
The same ornament set every year for…almost 30 years? Long enough to get both of us kids into adulthood. A lot of ornaments like these, but in even more garish colours. There were a few sentimental ornaments like the felt apple by my brother and my gold angel with custom engraving. Same tree too, a horrible heavy thing you had to assemble with colours painted on the tips of the pointy wires to show what layer they were.
It wasn’t what went on the tree but the ritual of putting it up. We had this garland, the kind that was big and fluffy and resembled scarves old movie stars wore. I’d run around wearing it and being a diva while Mom redistributed the ornaments to be more evenly distributed when we weren’t watching. My parents had lived in the same house for 30+ years, and we knew my 18th Christmas would be the last one in that house and it was pretty emotional.
Upon moving out and getting an apartment, Mom decided it was time to start anew with Christmas! She went through a couple years of new trees and ornaments (with the sentimental ones kept) before finally deciding what she liked best.
Christmas has changed now in my family. Our central place is my brother’s house and so the tree tradition is now his to make with his wife and my niece, who will be having her 2nd Xmas this year. Brother has decided tobogganing on Xmas morning will be New Tradition!
We had a Santa of pieced together plastic pellets. We also had a Santa statue and the musical Rudolph.
I have a star made out of red and white beads and some wire that my kindergarten teacher made for me. She gave them out to everyone, and I originally got a blue one. I was disappointed because I wanted a red one so I got another kid to trade me.
Mom has these salt dough ornaments that my sister and I made when we were in nursery school… I think. Mine is a heart-shaped piece with glitter blobs here and there, dated 1979. Sister’s is a bird with some random blue dots, dated 1981.
I miss lead [icicles](http://i.ebayimg.com/t/Fab-vintage-Christmas-lead-tinsel-Silver-Brite-Icicles-/00/$(KGrHqUOKjME4mq++nl(BOO(wyyS2!~~0_35.JPG)! What’s a little plumbism when you have a great looking tree?
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These fancy new mylar strips just don’t have the same look or feel of 1972’s decorations!
I miss my 70’s
Please be advised that I’m in possesion of a similar ornament and will send it to you if you want… “Silent Night” is in white flocking on blue-green glass, not ombre, but maybe it’ll do.
My sister has the ornament she and I always fought over – the Smuddit. It is a small (2" maybe) pink rubber bear that was originally the babe-in-arms of a mother bear wind-up toy. The squeaking noise the toy made as the mother rocked the baby sounded to us like “smuddit,” hence the name. When the wind-up mechanism died, the baby bear was separated from the mother and impaled on a hook to become a kid-safe Christmas ornament.
We always had a “grown-up tree” in the formal living room for the adults and older sibs. I have a lot of the ornaments from that tree that are really starting to show their age – glass bead garlands, glass clip-on birds with fiberglass tails, tinsel puffs, and a set of German beaded birdcage ornaments.
Me too. We didn’t have any – they probably weren’t cheap – but my aunt did, and I loved going to her house at Christmas.
I still have the styrofoam wreaths my kids made in day care 30+ years ago. Painted green, with nuts and stuff glued on. Mom made big styrofoam wreaths for everyone. Hers were covered with bits of yarn and had mini lights.
Mom had a small Christmas tree tabletop thingie that reacted to noise. Nothing funnier than a bunch of drunks talking to a Christmas tree to watch it bend and twitch.
OP here, would like to update. Our kid will be 18 months old soon, so we have a decor strategy. My husband is planning to get a regular size tree, 5 or 6 feet tall, and reinforce the tree base so it’s as untippable as such things get. Then, we will decorate mostly the upper part of the tree, with nontoxic unbreakables lower down. no lights this year.
I did get a used Martha Stewart tree skirt on eBay! So … oddly un-odd, and yet disturbing, that the most tasteful low-budget decor you can get has her name on it. It’s plain light sagey green velvet with a little subtle clear beading around the edge. I remember arranging these scraps of various things around our tree as a kid – mostly squares of white, glitter-laden synthetic felt that you were supposed to think looked like snow. blecch.
In the meantime,until we get the tree, I eBayed us a lovely wooden German windmill candle thingy that’s all teeny little deer and trees and a manger, no human figures at all, in natural-color woods, no paint. Lil’ Liminal is already fascintated by it when he sees a draft start it going whe it’s sitting just out of his reach in our woodstove room. I can’t wait to show it to him lit.
I also ordered plain dark red with silver stitching “pet size” personalized stockings for the three of us from Pottery Barn on clearance – apparently there are certain sizes more appropriate for the domesticated orders, with bigger ones for whoever you really really care about – though I think these pet-size ones may be close to the size of the ones my sister and I had growing up. Still gonna need a Clementine or two for the toe.
And I did get an Angel Chime set that I haven’t taken out of its little flat box yet. In looking for one of those, I learned that they’re really mostly a German tradition, rebranded “Swedish” post-WWI, now produced in all kinds of curious faraway lands. I also have beeswax candles that fit the Angel chime and the German windmill, so I will not be poisoning my family with OMG IT’S JUST LIKE DIESEL TRUCK EXHAUST IT’S KILLING US ALL fumes from the normal paraffin ones (and bonus: they smell great, and burn a little longer/slower, and come from a family business, and besides which my husband gets all nostalgic at them. His mom was a Thoreau-hippie).
If I can find the time, I have in mind a Craft Project to slice up a stack of obsolete CD-ROMS from my office into quarters, hotglue them back-to-back outside-in, drill holes, and hang them for their toddlerproof shiny refractive bling value. My dad, who along with my mom and sister, will be visiting in a couple of weeks; back in the 80s, he hung whole CD-ROMs on our tree and no one knew what they were, besides pretty, flat, and a bit on the large side. He’s a (now retired) librarian who helped institute early paperless card catalog replacement systems. So my craft project could be a) crafty & homemade, b) nostalgic, and c) a respect-shoutout to The Grandpa. and if the boy or the cats make off with one, no big.
I missed out on bubble lights in my life – no one had them in my parents’ childhood era, and they were way out of fashion in mine – but in reading up about the angel chimes and such, I learned that there was a made-for-TV-movie-quality battle over patenting rights in the US over bubblers.
I remember, when I was 5, we did not have a Christmas tree. My stepfather’s brother took it, along with alot of the plastic ornaments, for his kids because they did not have a tree…we ended up going to Christmas in the City and Treasure Island in Paramus, NJ to get a tree and some ornaments. We ate dinner at Howard Johnson’s. Our family tradition is to still go out to dinner (now on Christmas Eve). We found several boxes that he overlooked, thankfully.
Our ceramic Nativity scene…which now is in sorry shape…Joseph has lost his nose, a cow is without a horn, a Wise Man has a broken hand…(What happens in Bethlehem stays in Bethlehem?)…A musical plush Santa that was my stepdad’s, the paper mache (sp?) boots that held candy from the late 30’s…we used to have a light up Virgin Mary to go on top of the tree, but she has been replaced by an angel…The light up ceramic snowman, the snowman with the sparkles on it from the 50’s…and we used to have a cardinal from the 50’s, butt ugliest thing on the face of the earth…used to attach with a pipe cleaner, was flocked, had glitter and rick rack on it…it “disappeared” the year before we moved…I found a replica (set of 4 so they don’t disappear, MOM! at the dollar store)…
The old glass ornaments from the 40’s that were bought at Woolworth’s…they are getting translucent with age and too fragile to put on the tree, so we got replicas…the little burlap stocking that says “Bones Only” for our dogs we used to have…my “pig period” when I was little…wooden, ceramic, plastic, knit, you name it…pig ornaments…the Swiss Miss ornament from a mail in promotion in the 70’s…my Raggedy Ann and Andy from Mother Pep…the Hallmark dated ornaments (Snoopy, Betsey Clark, Norman Rockwell, Hummel…) and of course the hideous “bell” I made in kindergarten circa 1975…has to go on the tree every year…styrofoam cup with bits and pieces of felt and paper stuck to it…
Our tree was always about 1 - 1.5m tall and was anchored in a bucket of turf (yes, brick-sized turf blocks!)
Decorations included a string or two of lights - the 3-5 cm- sized hot bulbs and was only lighted for an hour or two a few evenings before Christmas day. Opaque glass balls were a highlight on the tree. But for me, the special time was on Christmas Eve. when the actual candles would be lit. Each candle had a small holder with a frill of something metalic and was held on the tree with a sort of alligator clip.
My dad held some sort of taper and let each kid light a candle or two. Then we would sing carols.
Later that night, after a super of ham, tomatoes and side fixings, red candles would be lit in windows to light the baby Jesus to his home.
Ireland, last of the 60’s when Santa was still a probability.
After that, my dad died. Nothing has ever come close again. Guess we modernized - still love to see real candles on a tree. Maybe I will revive that tradition before I am too old to appreciate it.