Old World Christmas Ornaments: The Brand Guide

Old World Christmas ornaments are the glass figures that make people stop in an aisle and say, out loud, to nobody, “they have a pickle.” Then a tooth, a taco, a Dala horse, a sloth, a stack of books, a family of snowmen with room for your names. It is one of the largest lines in our store, so we get the same questions all season: who makes these, why do they look the way they look, which one do I buy first, and what on earth is the pickle about. This is the guide we would hand you if we had the time to write it all down at the counter.

Who Makes Old World Christmas Ornaments

Old World Christmas began in 1979, when Tim and Beth Merck set out to bring figurative blown glass ornaments back to American trees. The style itself is much older. Mouth-blown glass figures were a nineteenth-century craft in the German glassmaking villages, and the town of Lauscha is usually credited with the first glass Christmas ornaments. What the Mercks did was revive those designs and techniques for a market that had mostly moved on to plastic balls, and the revival stuck. Today the company describes itself as America’s leading maker of mouth-blown, hand-painted glass ornaments, with more than 1,400 exclusive designs in its catalog and new ones every year.

How an Old World Christmas Ornament Is Made

Every piece follows the same sequence, and once you know it you can see it in the ornament in your hand.

Blown Into a Mold

Molten glass is mouth-blown into a finely carved mold made exclusively for Old World Christmas. The molds are the brand’s real asset: the shape of a cat, a cowboy boot, a slice of lemon exists because someone carved it, and the same design does not appear from another maker.

Silvered From the Inside

Once the glass has cooled, a hot solution of liquid silver is poured inside. That silver lining is what gives the ornaments their depth and glow, and it is why an unpainted Old World Christmas piece looks like a mirror rather than a window. It is also why older glass ornaments with the silvering worn away look dull: the shine was never on the outside.

Painted and Glittered by Hand

The color goes on by hand, in layers, and the finishing glitter is added last. Hand painting means two of the same design are close but never identical, which collectors treat as a feature rather than a flaw. Look at the eyes and the fine lines on any two of the same piece and you will see the brushwork.

The Old World Christmas Look

You can spot the brand from across the room once you know the signs. The glass is figurative, meaning it is shaped like the thing rather than printed on a ball. The colors are saturated and glossy, with glitter used as an accent rather than a coat. Most pieces are small, two to five inches, and surprisingly light, because blown glass is thin. The cap is a plain metal crown with a hanging loop, and the piece arrives in the brand’s own box. Many designs carry a short legend, the story behind the symbol, which is a big part of why these get given as gifts.

Why the Pickle, and the Other Legends

The glass pickle is the piece everyone asks about. The custom is to hide it somewhere on the tree on Christmas Eve, and the first child to find it on Christmas morning gets an extra present, or good luck for the year, depending on which version of the story your family tells. Where the tradition came from is cheerfully disputed; what matters is that it works, and that the Old World Christmas pickle has become one of the most recognizable ornaments in America. It is not the only legend in the line. The brand’s designs lean heavily on traditional symbols: birds for joy, a house for shelter, a heart for love, fruit for generosity, an acorn or pine cone for good fortune. Buying by legend is a lovely way to choose a gift when you do not know what the person collects.

Where to Start If You Are New

With over a thousand designs in the catalog, and hundreds on our shelves, the choice can be paralyzing. Three ways in that we recommend to customers:

Start With a Story

Pick the piece that matches a real thing in your life: the dog, the camera, the mahjong tiles, the golf cart, the state park you drive to every fall. Ornaments chosen this way get hung first every year and talked about every year, and that is the whole point of the line.

Start With a Legend Set

The Bride’s Tree Collection is the classic gift for a first married Christmas: twelve ornaments in a keepsake box with a card explaining what each one stands for, from the rabbit for hope to the heart for true love. It is also a graceful way to start any collection, because the twelve pieces hang well together and leave plenty of room to grow.

Start With a Milestone

First Christmas, new home, new baby, retirement, a pet remembered. The brand makes a design for most of life’s markers, and a boxed glass ornament reads as a real gift at a price that does not demand a special occasion. Our guide to ornaments as gifts has more ideas along these lines.

Collecting Old World Christmas Ornaments

Most people do not set out to collect these. They buy one, then one for a friend, then notice the tree is turning into a glass menagerie. If you want to be deliberate about it, a few things help.

Themes Hold Together

The catalog is wide enough that a focused tree looks intentional: all food, all animals, all travel, all Christmas symbols in traditional reds and golds. Mixed collections look best when the ornaments share a scale, so keep an eye on size as well as subject.

Retirements Happen

Old World Christmas retires designs regularly to make room for the new year’s releases, and retired pieces are what the serious collectors hunt. We do not quote values here, because they move and because condition is everything; the useful advice is simply that if a design matters to you, buy it while it is current. We stock both the new releases and a deep bench of designs from earlier years, so a list is worth bringing in.

Keep the Boxes

The original box protects the piece and matters if it ever changes hands. Nest the ornament in its box, keep the boxes together, and you will thank yourself every January.

Caring for Blown Glass Ornaments

Blown glass is sturdier than it looks and more fragile than you would like. Hang pieces on firm branches, away from the ends, and away from the edge the dog walks past. Use a hook or a ribbon, not the thin wire alone, for anything larger than a few inches. Dust with a soft brush, never a damp cloth, since water and glitter are enemies. Our guide to displaying ornaments covers the tree and the alternatives, and our storage guide covers the other eleven months: original boxes, a dry closet rather than a hot attic, and nothing heavy stacked on top.

Old World Christmas and the Colorado Connection

The brand’s catalog has a habit of turning up local favorites. Our customers hunt the national park designs, the mountain and wildlife pieces, the cowboy boots, and the brand has even made ornaments shaped like Colorado’s best known beer bottles. If you are building a tree that says where you live, Old World Christmas is a surprisingly good place to shop for it, and we keep the Colorado-flavored pieces together with our other Christmas ornaments.

Why We Carry So Many

Honest answer: because you keep asking for them. Old World Christmas is one of the largest lines in our store, with hundreds of designs on the shelves in any given season and the new releases arriving each year. They are the ornaments people buy for themselves, give to teachers, tuck into stockings and carry home to other states. Fifty years into running a Christmas store, we have learned to trust that instinct.

The Short Version

Old World Christmas ornaments are mouth-blown, silvered and hand-painted glass figures made from the brand’s own molds, in a style that goes back to nineteenth-century Germany and was revived in America in 1979. Pick the ones that tell your story, keep the boxes, hang them on firm branches, and let the pickle do its job on Christmas Eve.