My Vintage Soul

It Was A Good Year

As 2010 comes to a close, it's time to look back at my year of junkin'.

It was a good year for ... 

 

Meeting new blogging buddies, including Gina of Vintage Junk in My Trunk, left, and Sue of Vintage Rescue Squad, right, at Bouckville. I'm in the middle.

  

And spending time with old friends. That's Barbara of Oodles in the brown coat. Incidentally, Amy of Into Vintage asked when this picture first appeared if Barbara and I get into a vintage tug of war over items at a sale. The answer: Not yet. Despite living only 15 miles apart, we don't go to many sales together. The way I look at it that sometimes I get lucky and sometimes she gets lucky. In the end, it all works out and it's all good. 

 

I also added to my reflector collection in 2010.

 

And I accumulated an embarrassing amount of vintage ornaments, some of which were sold in my ...  

 

brand new Etsy shop, which I finally opened in 2010. My first sale was a box of 100 Dolls (actually 81), which included these pink dancers. One of my goals for 2011 is to make the shop bigger and better, which will hopefully result in a significant dent in my load of crap, as Mr. VS, calls it in the basement. 

 

I also met my namesake in plastic.   

 

And I found great stuff in the trash (!) during the annual town cleanup, including this German-made pressed paper witch.

 

And this Beistle witch, stirring her honeycomb tissue cauldron. 

 

In fact, these two discoveries seemed to set the tone for the best year ever for finding vintage Halloween. A few weeks later, I came upon this trio of vintage die cuts at a garage sale. Yes, at a garage sale.

 

And later, in the fall, there were these old party hats were in a box lot at an estate sale.

 

And a whole bunch of vintage Trick or Treat bags at the annual Route 34B sale.

Halloween seems to be following me through the end of the year. I found these orange plastic cookie cutters earlier this week when looking for half-off Christmas at the thrift store. The Christmas, by the way, was pretty picked over.

What will 2011 bring? A lot more good junk, I hope. I can hardly wait to get started. How about you? 

 

Bead-Dazzled

 

As much as I love vintage Christmas, I have come to realize that I can stop buying velveteen Santas. I think I have more than enough to survive any nuclear holocaust.

But that's not the case with vintage glass Christmas beads. Yes, you might say I am obsessed.

Here is just a portion of my collection, which would be the ones that didn't make it on the tree.

 

My infatuation started as a kid. There were four strands of glass beads on our family's tree and they came from my maternal grandmother. She had the most beautiful Christmas tree and nearly all the ornaments were bought the day after Christmas for half off at a pricey, downtown department store. 

Eventually, my mom divided the strands between myself and my three siblings. Being the oldest, I had first pick, and naturally, I chose the ones below, which were the prettiest of the bunch. Hey, wouldn't you?

 

Since then, I've obviously added to my collection, and I've come across some unusual strands. 

 

Like this one, which has white tinsel-like filaments between the gold beads.

 

And this one, which has tiniest of indents in the round beads.

 

 

And this one, which is a combination of tissue paper honeycomb balls and beads.

I buy glass beads just about every time I see them because I can't be sure when, or if, I will see them again. Last year, for example, was a good year. I found several strands, including some at rummage sales. This year, however, I found just one.

 

And that explains why I haven't even opened these pink beads, which are still in their original packaging. The little pink ones on the left were from Woolworth and were 75 cents. The ones on the right were from a Syracuse department store, Dey Brothers, and were $1.49.

 

But to avoid being the subject of a future episode of "Hoarders," I decided to part with just a little of my stash this year. I used a few beads for these ornaments that I made from curtain rod rings and vintage cards. And you know what? They look just about as good hanging like this on the Christmas tree as they did in a strand draped from bough to bough.

 

 

 

The Ribbon Tree

In all the years that I've been collecting vintage Christmas decorations, I've never seen anything like the ribbon tree.

I inherited it a few years ago from my mother-in-law, who bought it for her mother-in-law in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Mr. Vintage Soul remembers the tree on display at grandma's house, sitting on a round table near her spinet-style piano in the living room. She used it as her Christmas tree when she became too old to want to bother with a full-size tree.

 

But when it came to me, the ribbon tree hadn't been used for many years and it was in pretty sad shape. It had been stored in the basement, in a grocery bag. Its ribbon "branches" were flat and shapeless, its wooden base was more than a little wobbly and the tree topper was missing.

Despite all that, the ribbon tree still charmed me and intrigued me. There are no markings on its base so I'm not sure if it was purchased or homemade. Either way, it's really a thing of wonder.

Its trunk is a clear plastic pole, and five clear plastic tiers form the shape of the tree. Separating each tier are lengths of beautiful red and white ribbon, folded to resemble ribbon candy.

 

I knew that I had to try to salvage it. So, I tried inserting some small balls of tissue paper into the ribbon folds to plump them back up but that didn't seem to help. On to Plan B, which involved cutting several paper towel tubes into rings that were about the same width as the ribbon, and inserting those. Aha! Success. After a few days with the cardboard in place, the ribbon was back in its original shape.

 

Then I re-glued the base and added a new topper -- a uniquely shaped red Shiny Brite ornament turned upside-down.

 

But still, something was missing. 

 

Scrounging through my endless supply of Christmas crap (as Mr. VS calls it), I found several elves of a similar style. I popped them into the spaces between the curls.

 

I like it. What do you think? I'm hoping that grandma would be pleased too.

 

 

Snow-mageddon

I have a tendency to procrastinate when it comes to putting out my holiday decor. I have all this great vintage stuff, but every year, I wait until the last minute to display it, and then I complain that I shouldn't have waited until the last minute. So this year, I unpacked some of my favorites and a few newcomers about a week ago.

Which turned out to be a stroke of luck, because I haven't had time this week to do much else but deal with this:

 

And this.

 
 
And this was the new snow -- more than a foot -- in the driveway this morning.

 

It started falling on Sunday and it hasn't let up yet. Honestly, I don't know how many inches we have and maybe it's better not to know. At this point, everything seems like a big white blur. All I know is that I'm tired of shoveling. Thank goodness that it is supposed to stop sometime tomorrow.

In the meantime, and by that I mean before I have to shovel again, let's take a quick look at what I did get done before Snow-mageddon hit. Here are my Santas and snowmen, which occupy the kitchen.

 

Now this is my kind of winter wonderland. The only snow is that which is artfully applied to the bottle brush trees, which means no shoveling. I'm loving that. If you have been reading my blog for a while, you might recognize the big snowman in the back. He's a music box and I found him at the curb as a city trash truck was right on my heels. Read about it here. Those glittered plastic trees, by the way are new (old) additions and still have their original Sibley's price tags (85 cents for the little one, $1.25 for the big one).

 

And speaking of new additions, there's the silk ornament snowman from my day of being bad, a few more of those plastic trees, and on the far left, a candy container that I picked up for a dime at a church rummage sale. Once again, I felt like I was robbing those church ladies.

As for Santas ... 

 

The counterpart to the silk ornament snowman is in the back. The Santas in the front are salt and pepper shakers.

Two newcomers are these Santas.

 

The big guy in the back has led a hard life, hence the evidence of glue and his chipped beard, but he's still solid and weighs, I swear, at least five pounds. Mr. VS thinks he's made of lead. The little guy in the front, who is much lighter, came off the tree at a recent estate sale.

 

I hadn't intended to put out Santa Sheriff and shotgun-carrying Mrs. Claus but Mr. VS requested them. Note to self: Should I be concerned that with all my Christmas crap, that this is what he wanted to see? 

Finally, a group shot.

 

The embossed foil banner is another new addition although it's been packed away for a while. I discovered it in its original cellophane bag at an estate sale. I think it's finally found a perfect home.  

 

 

 

Our First Christmas Tree

It was 1956. President Eisenhower was re-elected to his second term. Elvis Presley appeared for the first time on "The Ed Sullivan Show." Movie star Grace Kelly became Princess Grace. And, somewhere in Syracuse, a first Christmas together was celebrated.

 

The newlyweds were no doubt young, maybe high school sweethearts. In those years, Syracuse was booming and manufacturing jobs were plentiful. He might have been working on the line at General Electric, making televisions, or at Syracuse China, turning out plates and mugs for restaurants and airlines. She was probably a homemaker but thought about going to college some day.

Their first Christmas was simple. They had a small tree, maybe one that they found at one of the seasonal tree lots that used to dot West Genesee Street, still the site of Syracuse's "automobile row." They probably decorated it with a few ornaments and a strand of lights from Woolworth's or Kresge's. In that era, both were on Salina Street along with several department stores in Syracuse's bustling downtown.

In time, they moved from that cramped first apartment, the one she always romanticized about purely for sentimental reasons, and into a split level in the suburbs. They had children, and then, welcomed several grandchildren.

And every year, when they put up the Christmas tree, she reached for the box labeled "From Our First Christmas Tree - 1956."

 

And that's where it seems that the story ends. Or at least my version of it. I wish I knew more. I wish I had a clue about who these people were and why something so precious to them ended up on top of a pile of junk at the thrift store, but, sadly, I don't. And maybe the story is better left to my imagination.

I suspect that the ornaments inside the box -- two Dresden-trimmed drummers -- might know, having seen and heard everything that was shared over more than 50 Christmases, but they aren't talking.

 

But maybe, silent observers that they are, they're listening. And if they are, I would tell them to somehow send a message to those newlyweds, wherever they might be now, and let them know that their first Christmas will be a part of my Christmas.