Vintage Christmas Decorations Worth Buying
Christmas is the one category where buying old is obviously better, and most people already know it. Nobody puts a plastic ornament on the tree and feels anything. The harder part is knowing what's worth buying, because vintage Christmas covers everything from a ten dollar tin to a hundred dollar set of glasses. Here's how I sort it, split into what I'd buy for my own house and what I'd buy to give away.
Plenty of it crosses over. A good tin is a decoration in November and a present in December.
What I actually look for
Needlepoint stockings first. Somebody sat and stitched that by hand over weeks, and there is no new version of it at any price. When one turns up I take it.
Glass ornaments, always.
Stocking holders in brass, silver or iron. The new ones are light and slide off the mantel the moment there's anything in the stocking. The old ones are heavy enough to do the job. Every brass set I've had has sold.
Anything unusual. One odd ornament nobody else will have on their tree is worth more than another box of matched balls.
And kitsch, without apology. The slightly ridiculous Christmas things sell faster than almost anything else I carry. People want the ceramic Santa with the strange face. So do I.
Textiles are the other thing I chase. Anything tartan. A good wool blanket. Needlepoint pillows, for the same reason as the stockings. Christmas in New England has a specific look and plaid is most of it, which is also why anything Ralph Lauren works here. He built a company on this exact feeling.
My own weakness is vintage Santa cookie plates. Those are the hardest ones to put out in the shop instead of keeping in my own kitchen.
Part one · For your own house
Brass ornaments are the most underrated thing on a tree
Cut and etched brass ornaments were made in real quantity in America through the seventies and eighties, and they've aged better than almost anything else from that period. Flat pieces of brass, cut into a scene, sometimes etched with a date.
Four reasons I keep buying them. They don't break, which matters when you're storing something eleven months a year in a box in the attic. They take up no room. They look right on any tree, real or artificial, colored lights or white. And they're cheap.
They also warm up as they age. New brass is yellow and hard. Forty-year-old brass has gone soft and a little dark in the recesses, and it catches light in a way the new stuff doesn't.
In the shop now
Etched brass Santa Claus$14
Angel on a shooting star$14
NOEL carolers, made in USA$16
Sleigh Bells Ring$18
Met Museum 1986 brass birds, set of 4$38
That Met set is the one I'd take home. Museum ornaments were issued annually, they were designed rather than manufactured, and a complete set of four from one year doesn't turn up often.
Glass, which is where the real age is
Glass ornaments are the oldest things on most trees, and the ones worth buying are usually older than people assume. The hand-blown ones have a weight and a wobble to them that machine-made glass doesn't, and the colors sit in the glass rather than on it.
They're also the category where it's easiest to buy something new by mistake.
If you want to be able to tell, I wrote a separate piece on how to date a glass Christmas ornament. Three things to check and it takes about ten seconds.
In the shop now
The mantel
The tree gets all the attention and the mantel is where people actually look, because it's at eye level and it's up from the first of December.
Stocking holders are the thing to get right. Heavy ones stay put. And a wreath doesn't have to be greenery, which is the point of the Dresden brass one below. That piece is the most clicked thing in the shop, and I think it's because it reads as a wall sculpture that happens to work at Christmas rather than a decoration you have to put away in January.
In the shop now
Brass beyond the tree
The same reason brass ornaments work applies to everything else made of it. It doesn't chip, it doesn't date, and it looks like it cost more than it did.
In the shop now
Tins and trays are the cheapest way in
If you've never bought vintage Christmas and don't know where to start, start here. Ten to twenty dollars, useful the rest of the year, and the graphics are the whole point. Nobody designs a tin like that anymore.
The Avon tins are sold one at a time rather than as a set, so you can take one or take all four.
In the shop now
The table is where vintage pays off most
Ornaments come out for a month. The table is where people actually sit, and it's the cheapest room in the house to change, because you only need a few small things.
Napkin rings do more than they should for what they cost. Old glasses beat new ones because the glass is heavier and the etching is deeper. And nobody notices a mismatched table the way you think they will, so you don't need a matched set of twelve.
In the shop now
Porcelain holly napkin rings, set of 4$24
Gold bow napkin rings, set of 4$18
Sakura gold snowflake glasses, pair$32
Pewter cocktail picks, set of 6$38
Italian green ceramic holly pitcher$34
Holly porcelain candlestick holders, pair$24
Ralph Lauren gingham plaid tumblers, set of 4$85
Sixty dollars of old napkin rings and candlesticks changes a table more than three hundred dollars of new anything.
Part two · For giving
Spode, and why you shouldn't buy the set
Spode's Christmas Tree was drawn in 1938 for the American market and has been in production ever since, which is why it's the pattern most people picture when they think of Christmas china.
The part people get wrong is thinking they need the whole set. They don't, and I'd argue they shouldn't want it. A table where everything is the same brand looks like a registry rather than a house somebody lives in. One recognizable piece reads as deliberate. Twelve of them reads as a purchase.
So buy the mug. It's still made, which means old and new sit together without anyone noticing, and a single piece is a good gift on its own. Two of the ones here still have their original boxes, so they're presents you don't have to wrap.
In the shop now
Spode mug and coaster in the original box$18
Spode sentiment mug in its gift tin$32
Spode Christmas Tree water glasses, pair$17
Matched sets are the fastest way to make a beautiful table look bought. Let things arrive from different places over years. That's the whole point of buying old.
Linen napkins, and the things people don't buy themselves
Beautiful vintage linen napkins are one of the best gifts I know, and they sell out here every time. Hand-embroidered, hemstitched, monogrammed with somebody else's initials. Nobody buys those for themselves and everybody is pleased to be given them.
Same logic for the rest of this category. Leather gloves, cashmere-lined especially, because a good old pair is softer than a new pair will be for years, somebody else already did the breaking in. Cashmere scarves. Small leather wallets, which are the easiest thing in the shop to give to someone you don't know well.
These move fast enough that what's listed online is rarely what's actually on the shelf. Ask me.
A couple that are online right now
Baking, and the plates with the recipe on them
There's a whole category of vintage bakeware where the recipe is printed right into the dish. Royal China made a lot of them through the seventies and eighties. They sell almost as fast as I can put them out, because the recipe is the whole appeal. It turns a baking dish into something you read, and it tells you what to make in it, which is more than most bakeware does.
For December the ones to hunt are apple and pecan. Those are the pies people actually make at Christmas, and a dish that arrives with its own recipe glazed into the bottom is a better gift than one that doesn't. Bake in it or hang it on a kitchen wall. Both work.
The cast iron does the same job for longer. A gingerbread house mold is the kind of thing a family uses every December for thirty years and then argues about who inherits.
In the shop now
The keepsakes, for people who mark the year
Christopher Radko. The company exists because of a disaster. The Radko family tree went over one Christmas and took more than a thousand mouth-blown heirloom ornaments with it. He couldn't find anything good enough to replace them, so in 1985 he went to Poland and had them remade by hand using old techniques. They're still made that way, and early ones hold their value.
Lenox. American porcelain, and their annual keepsakes are what people buy to mark a year. A dated Baby's First Christmas is exactly the thing somebody is hunting for right now because they lost theirs, or because they want the year a child was born.
In the shop now
Most of the ornaments are only in the shop
Worth being straight about this. What's above is a fraction of the Christmas here.
Photographing and listing a fourteen dollar ornament takes the same work as a two hundred dollar piece. Same photos, same measurements, same description, same packing when it sells. Under about thirty dollars it isn't worth the hour, and the ornaments sell before I'd have finished anyway. So most of them go straight onto the shelves and never touch the website at all.
What you see here is what happened to get photographed. The rest is in Fairfield.
So if it's ornaments you're after, come in. From September 1st we're at 1139 Post Road. Or tell me what you're looking for and I'll go dig through it for you.
And buy it before December
I buy Christmas all year, at estate sales in April and July, because that's when it turns up and nobody else is looking for it. The shop is at its best long before anyone is thinking about it.
All of it is one of a kind. One set of the Met birds, one Radko, one gingerbread mold. When something goes there isn't another behind it and I can't reorder. December is the month everything is gone, not the month everything arrives.
Shop vintage Christmas
What's online is the bigger pieces. The ornaments are mostly on the shelves in Fairfield.
Shop Christmas Visit in Fairfield