vintage christmas decorations

The week after Thanksgiving is when I like to decorate for the holidays. Usually I like to do this over the long weekend, but this year Heidi & I were working at a local craft fair and there just wasn’t enough time. Tonight, after work, I am going to get the boxes of decorations down and start having fun! I have a VERY large collection of vintage Christmas decorations. So large, that each year, I have to decide on what part of the collection is going to be displayed (crazy, huh?)

Over the past 7 years I’ve seen my collection move from more traditional glass ornaments to candy-colored plastic. In thinking about this, I’m pretty sure this started with the discovery of a large box of ornaments at a garage sale. The box was marked $4.00. When I picked out a few and brought them up to the lady-in- charge to pay, she told me the price was for the whole box! Even though the majority of the contents were not my thing, how could I resist? The ornaments were mostly plastic, very juvenile, from the 1960s. My intention was to give these away, but I tucked the box away with the rest of my decorations and sort of forgot about it. Later that year we moved to a new house, and instead of the large, 8 ft, noble fir tree we used to have, I could only fit a small 4 ft tree. I was kind of bummed out, so I decided to do something different and use a white artificial tree. As I started loading it up with ornaments, I kept being drawn to the candy colored ones with the super cute faces and fuzzy flocking from the garage sale. They looked so happy and really “popped” against the white of the tree. Ever since that year, I’ve became obsessed with finding more!

This style of Christmas decorations can still be found very cheaply. I still discover them all the time at yard sales and thrift stores. The ease in finding these, makes it even more fun to try something a little silly or weird and see what you can do with it! So here is a gallery to inspire you, and maybe as you are reading this, it will put a little holiday smile on your face!

Photos top to bottom: 1) my tree 2008, 2) vintage mouse ornament on my tree, 3) collage of decorations from my collection, 4) you can still grab these Christmas cuties for your tree here and here from etsy seller vintagegoodies, 5) yuletide village from etsy seller estateofmind, 6) but not this last fellow…he’s all mine!

-Susie