Ornate Craze Hangs on Memories

By Thanksgiving, Jacki Bell hopes to have her Christmas trees trimmed.

All 26 of them.

Bell needs a virtual mini-forest in her Corona home to hold the thousands of ornaments she’s collected--far too many Santas, snowmen and glass baubles for one measly tree.

She’s hardly alone. Across the nation, adults are amassing ornaments the way kids snapped up Pokemon cards. Ornament sales have been climbing in recent years, fueled by the boom in collectibles. Last year, collectible ornaments sales jumped 51% to $584 million while other Christmas decorations were experiencing ho-hum sales, according to Unity Marketing Inc., a marketing, research and consulting firm in Pennsylvania.

What’s driving the ornament craze? Affluent--and very nostalgic--baby boomers, who are latching onto ornaments of old-fashioned nutcrackers, vintage toasters and Howdy Doody lunch pails.

“Everybody’s trying to buy their memories back,” says Clara Johnson Scroggins, a Florida collector and ornament historian who may hold the world record for her collection of about 1 million ornaments. (She keeps them in climate-controlled storage rooms.)

Some collectors are almost obsessive, spending the night in front of stores to get the first glimpse of a new ornament, traipsing after ornament designers for autographs and even dressing up as their favorite ornament at trade shows. Some band together--such as the Ho Ho Club of Orange County--poring over ornament books or exchanging tips about where to buy them.

“If someone says they need an ornament, we understand it,” says Janine Kammeyer, president of the 70-member club.

So do an array of businesses.

Christopher Radko has helped turn ornaments into designer products--blown glass concoctions in complex shapes and shimmering color, priced anywhere from $25 to $250. The New York-based company says its sales have jumped 75% over the last two years. Another Christmas decoration importer, Kurt S. Adler Inc., is breaking records this year with its new Harry Potter ornaments, which retailers bought sight unseen, according to regional sales manager Roger Gruen.

The growing popularity of ornaments has spawned new companies that are importing from Europe and elsewhere, while nudging established companies to expand--or add--ornament lines. For example, Baldwin Hardware Corp., has been selling solid brass ornaments plated with 24-karat gold, priced from $15 to $50. In just three years, the Pennsylvania company’s ornament sales have matched its four-decades-old candleware business, says product manager Debby Parkinson.

The surge in demand has prompted some collectors to part with their possessions--reselling them on the secondary market at a tidy profit. One hot Hallmark ornament--the “Millennium Express,” which features miniature trains that run forward and backward on a tiny track--was bid at $125 recently on EBay after retailing for $42, says Kammeyer of the Ho Ho Club.

But most ornament aficionados tend to hang on tightly to their collections. Ornaments become dangling scrapbooks, marking time, jogging memories.

“Almost anything you point out, I can tell you when I got it, why I got it and where,” says Bell, who was bitten by the ornament bug at 13 when her grandmother died, leaving behind her plastic Christmas tree. As its branches dropped off, Bell bought bigger ornaments to fill the empty spaces.

Today, Bell’s home has few empty spaces. The tallest of her 26 artificial trees--a 16-footer--will hold about 4,000 ornaments, including a tiny spinning bird that belonged to her grandmother. So does she have enough yet? “Never!” exclaims Bell, who bought 265 more this year.

Frankie Geary can relate. The former president of Orange County’s Ho Ho Club has thousands of ornaments and buys more every year. Although she sells some collectibles on the Internet, Geary considers most of her ornaments family treasures: “You threaten your children and grandchildren within an inch of their life that they’re not to sell them.”

Indeed, American households are almost certain to become increasingly weighed down with holiday decorations in coming years, as baby boomers inherit angels, bulbs and bells from their parents and eventually pass them on their children.

“You’re not just keeping an ornament,” Scroggins says of such hand-me-downs. “You’re keeping their memories. And that’s important.”

For many collectors, the hunt for ornaments continues year round. Buyers give them as birthday, wedding and Mother’s Day gifts, and gather them while on vacation. Some companies now sell Easter, Halloween and even Independence Day ornaments.

For Ho Ho Club members, the cycle begins each March with the arrival of catalogs heralding the latest designs. Quickly, collectors start shooting off orders, says Kammeyer. Then there’s the mid-July “premiere” of ornaments at Hallmark stores.

“We always say we’re not going to buy that many,” says Kammeyer, “but we end up buying loads.”

The first commercial ornaments--thick blown glass “Kugels”--were brought to America from Germany in the late 1880s. F.W. Woolworth and other retailers imported them by the hundreds of thousands. Sears’ Christmas catalog helped spread them across the nation.

When two World Wars put a crimp in the ornament pipeline, American businesses picked up the slack, cranking out round balls in basic colors that often were sold by the dozen or half-dozen.

The business changed abruptly in 1973 when Hallmark--which had stores nationwide--began selling ornaments that were named and dated, one ball per box, says Scroggins. Suddenly, ornaments were personal.

“Now you could buy ornaments for the teacher, baby’s first Christmas, etc.,” she says.

Also in the 1970s, Disney allowed the greeting card company to sell ornaments in the shapes of its characters, breaking open a new market. Other companies began offering upscale options in china and crystal.

Over the past 15 years, Radko and other companies have helped return the ornament industry to its roots, importing intricate, blown-glass, hand-painted decorations from Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

“When I first saw them I thought, this is gorgeous, but nobody’s going to pay $40 for an ornament,” says Meredith Schwartz, collectibles editor for the trade magazine Gifts & Decorative Accessories. “But they do.”

Now, the Internet has broadened the options. Web sellers offer ornaments made of nuts, shells, yarn, starfish, dough--even volcanic ash.

And buyers’ tastes are equally varied.

Browsing recently at Roger’s Gardens, a Corona del Mar nursery that also sells ornaments, Louise Shipe latched onto a Santa astride a moose for $22.

“The price isn’t that bad if it means something,” the San Pedro resident says. “Where else are you going to find a Santa on a moose?”