A burst of aluminum fluff greets customers outside the front door of Cone Ball Antiques in downtown Eugene. It’s a wreath made by store consultant and designer J. Sylvester from the branches of a vintage aluminum tree’s pom-pom branches — the kind of Christmas decoration that epitomizes the mid-century modern design made increasingly popular by collectors in the past 10 to 15 years.
With a bright, metallic sheen and tightly bunched aluminum strips jumping out like flower sprays off the end of each branch, pom-pom trees — and that wreath — are made to stand out and be noticed. It’s just the kind of cool and trippy sensibility, mixed with form and function, that characterizes the mid-century period of the 1950s and ’60s.
For the baby boom generation, mid-century modern is about collecting things from their childhood, Sylvester says. “Collecting has to do with memory, and it’s usually what your parents and grandparents had.”
The era ushered in a new taste in décor, of minimal, clean lines and bright — even space-age — colors. It took deeply rooted traditions such as the Christmas tree and its Victorian-influenced ornaments and sent them to the moon to be transformed into blown-glass and plastic spaceships and UFOs bathed in metallic turquoise, pink, yellow, silver and gold.
Sylvester keeps at home a beloved ornament that holds a shape only possible with plastic: a planet-shaped center with 25 spikes circling it that look like candles, giving the whole ornament the look of a spaceship, he says.
“That’s the part of the ’50s I like about plastics,” he says. “They’re cooler and wilder than the glass.”
The plastic also is of a different quality, says Cora Frazer, co-owner with Carl Ernst of Oak Street Vintage in Eugene. Nowadays, “people need to figure out how to make things as cheap as possible,” she says. The plastic of those days simply looks and feels different.
Imported, exported cheer
The mid-20th century was the heyday of Japanese manufacturing, with West christmas flowers germany Many of these ornaments, then, are not only space-aged but simple classics made of paper, cardboard and cellophane — low-cost materials available after the war. “Sugar houses” from Japan, for example, have a hole for inserting a C9 light, to brighten a whole Christmas tree with simple, lighted houses. Other imported classics include “kneehuggers,” ornaments of elves hugging their knees.
But there also was the Shiny Brite company in the United States, started by German immigrant Max Eckhardt, who partnered with Corning Glass Co. in New York when World War II threatened his ornament import business. Because of Eckhardt, Corning became the biggest producer of ornaments, shipping for final decoration hundreds of thousands of mold-produced ornaments of thin glass output by the company’s reconfigured light-bulb machine.
Shiny Brite became the largest producer of these ornaments — in bright metallic oxide colors — until its closure in 1962, and is the brand most often seen in antique stores. Collectors still can find whole sets, in their original boxes, at reasonable prices (about $18 for six) at local antique stores. Single ornaments also are available, averaging $5-$6.
True antique hunters will need to look closely, though, as the Christopher Radko Co. began to reproduce the Shiny Brite line in 1985. Those boxes will say “Christopher Radko presents.”
Visions of Christmas future
“Atomic” is a term often used to describe the shapes of mid-century modern ornaments and other futuristic items designed during that era.
“The ‘Sputnik,’ for instance, is considered a modern shape,” says Ernst at Oak Street Vintage, in reference to an ornament with a starburst of metallic points named after the first satellite put into space by Russia in 1957.
This era of metal and streamlined surfaces also marks the birth of the aluminum Christmas tree from which to hang all those complementary metallic-coated, mica-encrusted ornaments.
Among aluminum tree shapes are tapered (with equal-length branches angled differently to form the tree shape) and fountain (with more naturally varying branch lengths). Branch styles include the pom-pom and the sparkler, which is suggestive of the fireworks. These trees were not meant to be evergreen so much as “Evergleam,” the name of one company’s line.
During this heyday of America’s newfound love with manufacturing, millions of aluminum trees were produced in the 1950s and ’60s, and remain available. Current prices can range from $65 for a 4-foot aluminum tree to $400 for a 6-foot gold aluminum tree and also christmas flowers germany blog .
If the shiny aluminum itself is not bright enough, the color wheel — the premier accoutrement for metallic trees — can be added. The floor-level electric floodlight, fitted with a rotating glass color wheel, will bathe a tree in a merry, oh-so-mid-century shower of red, yellow, blue and green.
Writer Tracy Ilene Miller can be contacted at sp.feedback@registerguard.com.
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