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Feather trees and bubble lights Christmas adornments of the past at museum
Feather trees and bubble lights Christmas adornments of the past at museum
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
BY MARIANNE RZEPKA
News Staff Reporter
The Spirit of Christmas Past might be found this season at the Museum on Main Street.
For baby boomers, it might be in the form of bubble lights.
If the bubbling Christmas tree lights popular in the 1950s don't bring back memories of searching for presents in the early morning light of past Dec. 25s, there could be something else in the "Lights, Ornaments and Trees'' exhibit at the historical museum, located at 500 N. Main St. in Ann Arbor, to jog some memories.
Dale Sirkle, a Livonia antiques dealer, spoke at the opening of the exhibit earlier this month.
"The neat thing about Christmas collectibles is often they're passed down through generations, so people start with their own family's ornaments,'' says Sirkle, who owns the antique firm Sirkle Appraisals Inc.
The ornaments and lights at the museum exhibit date from the 1900s to the 1960s, says Alice Cerniglia, the museum's director, who put the exhibit together.
There are ornaments made from cotton, glass and paper, along with painted pine cones and walnuts. The lights include slender bulbs from the 1920s and fat outdoor lights from the '50s.
If those bubble lights make you think back to your childhood, they are arranged on a tree near pictures of a few varieties of them. Cerniglia says she has an entire book full of pictures of bubble lights with bases shaped like flying saucers and holiday figures.
One display case has a number of Christmas ornaments, including delicate glass icicles and mercury glass kugel ornaments, made with thick glass coated inside with mercury, says Cerniglia.
Early kugel balls were handmade in Germany and imported to the United States in the early 20th century, says Sirkle. U.S. companies began factory manufacturing of the heavy decorations in the 1930s, he says.
In the front room, a small, green tree looks like it might be made of plastic needles, but it's really a feather tree, made from goose feathers dyed green. Those also appeared in Germany. They were endorsed by Theodore Roosevelt in the United States - to preserve natural evergreens from being cut down.
Nearby is a large folding card from the early 1900s. Fully opened, it's the Nativity scene. Behind the manger, angels hang in a circle.
The entire card would be placed on a radiator, and the rising heat would cause the angels to fly above the scene, Cerniglia says.
There are also several small aluminum trees, which were popular in the 1960s, Sirkle says. They were lit by a color wheel that projected changing hues onto the shiny branches.
They lost popularity just about the time Charlie Brown in "A Charlie Brown Christmas'' decided he wanted a real tree, says Sirkle.
Well, that and the fact that the metal trees were a fire hazard when regular lights were strung around them, he says. A little fraying of the wires caused electricity to flow into the aluminum branches, he says.
In another corner of the museum exhibit stands a tree decorated with all manner of ornaments, many of them handmade.
On the tree stand small, white candles attached to the branches.
If that seems like a fire hazard, Cerniglia points out that the candles were seldom lit, and when they were, buckets of water and sand were kept nearby.
Sometimes, she says, the tree was put up in a room that was closed until Christmas Day. The doors would be opened then for the family to see the fully lit tree and the presents, which could be hanging from its branches.
In a way, Cerniglia says, "The tree was the present.''
Marianne Rzepka can be reached at 734-994-6820 or mrzepka@annarbornews.com.
©2006 Ann Arbor News© 2006 Michigan Live. All Rights Reserved.
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