25,000 Hours of Light, It’s a ‘Shiny Brite’ Christmas
- Valerie Thompson
- Dec 16, 2016
- 3 min read
When I was a kid, our artificial Christmas tree looked as if it had been fabricated out of oversized bent green pipe cleaners; it was assembled with the entire family struggling to sort and match the painted ends of the branches with a central corresponding, increasingly chipped, color-coded wooden rod. While the fake trees of today are better at disguise and construction than they were 40 years ago, it turns out that buying one that had been pre-strung with lights was a bad idea. Cutting out the no-longer-functioning strands involved the removal of a bazillion surprisingly sharp plastic clips. We’ve had white lights for years, and I’d thought they were classy and sophisticated when I was first on my own. Thanks to my annoyance with the removal of ex-lights, combined with the enthusiastic urging of our 13-year-old (who proclaimed colored lights to be far more “beautiful and new”), we now have aggressively vivid LED lights that guarantee us 25,000 hours of Christmas cheer.
Every year, I open the boxes of decorations with trepidation and wonder the same thing: Can our cats be trusted? Ultimately, I set aside such caution and replace it with my stronger belief: Use the Good Stuff. Although I have Waterford crystal decorations and West German blown iridescent glass balls as fragile as frozen bubbles, it’s the Shiny Brite ornaments from Woolworth-level department stores that are most valuable to me. It’s because of such ornaments’ association with the ones from my youth that I pick them up when I find them at tag sales. In the mid-1970s, Dad’s mom moved to an assisted-living apartment and she gave him her boxes of Christmas decorations. He had few items remaining from his childhood, so it was his reaction that branded them as precious in my mind. Until then, we’d only had red velveteen or gold glitter over polystyrene foam balls on the tree. Given that we also had a wonderfully dim German shepherd named Boot (in honor of a similarly dim dog in the British Perishers comic strip) who knocked our tree over three times in one season, Dad’s concern about the breakable decorations was valid. Nevertheless, I thought the molded glass balls, bells, teardrops, and unusual shapes were beautiful. I loved their mirrored surfaces, their translucent and opaque colors, and their odd stripes of glitter and fluorescent paint. As I lovingly place the last ornament on our extremely eclectic tree, I’m left hoping the same thing for which I hope every year: that our kitties don’t imitate Boot.
Uncle Sam shakes Santa’s hand in this detail from a Shiny Brite box. Love the silliness. Don’t take the Uncle Sam out of Christmas. U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
A small section of our tree displays its eclectic mix of decorations. (Yes, that’s a Dalek.)
O Holy Hand Grenade? When my husband was small, his favorite ornament was a bunch of molded glass grapes similar to this one. He liked it, because he thought it was supposed to be a hand grenade.
This is the wreath from my childhood. My parents bought it in the mid-1960s, and I remember a grease-pencil price of either $.89 or $1.89 scrawled on the corrugated clamshell-box lid. It’s from Cutter’s, an outlet store on Conneaut Lake Road in Meadville, forever associated with visits to relatives in western Pennsylvania. I’d save up my allowance for trips there. The store rambled, and I never knew what “treasures” I’d find. I smile every year when I hang the wreath.
The tinkling of the angels whacking into the bells signaled that Santa was finished, and my brother and I were free to go downstairs and start opening presents. My husband says he remembered having one as a child, too, but his father was annoyed, rather than delighted, by the chimes. If it weren’t missing a couple pieces, I’d share a video to let you judge for yourself.
These oversized ornaments were used in store windows in the late 19th century, and I’m tempted to display them year-round. As I arrange them as part of the centerpiece (with the ruler showing the scale for the photo), I’m reminded of Catalog Living, script a few lines of Elaine and Gary dialogue in my head, and resist the urge for another year.
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