Celebrating Christmas Ornaments by Nina Chertoff and Susan Kahn is a small hardcover with vibrant colour photos and minimal text showing decorations from two time periods, 1840-1960 and 1960-2006 (the year the book was published). I much preferred the earlier time as I enjoy looking at antique ornaments. My Christmas tree theme this year is in fact antique decorations. Unfortunately, the authors devoted only 32 pages to those 120 years yet the remaining 118 pages were for the more contemporary time period. What captured my interest were the bright rainbow hues of early plastic and even earlier celluloid ornaments. Celluloid was a fragile medium, as well as being highly flammable, and not many of those decorations survive.
Far too many of the more recent decorations were represented by the luxury designs produced by Tiffany, Swarovski, Gucci, Versace among others. I really can’t see the point in spending hundreds of dollars for an ornament covered in tiny pearls and crystals. I suppose if you have too much money to know what to do with it all, spend it on real gems for your Christmas balls. I’d hate to drop one.