German Glass Ornaments: How They’re Made and Stored

Back in December 2018, I spent twenty terrifying minutes in a drafty studio outside Munich watching a glassblower named Stefan, who looked like he'd survived several distinct historical tragedies. He stood over an open flame in a scorched leather apron, hyperventilating into a metal pipe to inflate a glowing lump of red glass that looked alarmingly like an extracted organ. I didn't see an artist creating holiday magic; I saw a man actively trying not to detonate a molten bomb two feet from my face. It was my introduction to traditional glass craft: an enterprise rooted entirely in high-heat anxiety, where every finished sphere feels less like a decoration and more like a fragile hostage situation you voluntarily bring into your living room.

What Are German Glass Ornaments?

German glass ornaments are mouth-blown, hand-silvered, hand-painted glass tree decorations made by the technique developed in Lauscha, Germany, in the 1840s.

Lauscha is a mountain village so dreary and secluded that shivering counted as a local pastime. A glassblower there began blowing thin glass spheres to hang on trees instead of the fruit and nuts families had traditionally used, and the idea caught on quickly enough to become its own industry within a generation. Early artisans lined the inside with a mixture of heavy metals now long banned — mercury or lead, according to The American Ceramic Society — because nobody had yet worked out that decorating your tree shouldn't double as a chemistry hazard. Decades later, retail tycoon F.W. Woolworth imported a small crate to America, convinced consumers were far too sensible to spend real money on fragile balls of air. He was wrong, and by around 1880, according to the Museum of Glass Art Lauscha, he was organizing their export to America, proving that our appetite for buying paper-thin objects to dangle above unforgiving hardwood floors has never once been in question.

Lauscha has made glass since 1597; it has made Christmas ornaments only since the 1840s. — Corning Museum of Glass

Chive's blown glass ornaments are made the same way.

How Are Glass Ornaments Made?

Glass ornaments are made in five hand steps: a glass tube is heated and blown into shape, silvered inside, dipped in lacquer, hand-painted, and capped.

The process begins with a rod of clear soda-lime glass, rotated over a gas torch until it softens into the consistency of hot honey. The artisan blows into a hollow pipe with real lung force — inflating the glass either freehand or inside a mold — until it takes its final shape. Once cooled, a warm silver nitrate solution — silver nitrate and sugar water, per the Corning Museum of Glass — goes into the hollow core and gets shaken around like a small, temporary science experiment until the interior reflects a full mirror finish, a considerable upgrade from the heavy-metal mixture earlier generations used for the same job. Only then is it hand-painted, dusted with glitter that will outlive several vacuum cleaners, and capped with a metal hook.

Silver nitrate replaced lead and mercury inside Lauscha ornaments from 1870. — Museum of Glass Art Lauscha

Mouth-Blown vs Molded Glass Ornaments

Mouth-blown and molded glass ornaments are not opposites: most shaped ornaments are mouth-blown into a mold, and the real divide is hand-blown versus machine-pressed.

"Molded" doesn't mean machine-made. Our ornaments are molded — shaped by hand, by real people, into the same kind of iron and plaster molds glassblowers have used for close to two centuries. What actually separates a real molded ornament from a mass-produced one isn't the mold itself, it's what's doing the shaping on the other end: a person, working the material by hand, versus an industrial press running the same motion a few thousand times an hour with nobody paying attention to any single piece.

The full spotting method for old pieces is in our vintage Christmas ornaments guide.

How to Tell If Glass Is Hand Blown

To tell if glass is hand blown, check three things: a hand-crimped cap, uneven wall thickness, and silvering that pools unevenly inside.

Pop off the little metal hanging cap and inspect the stem underneath — a genuine handmade ornament has a hand-crimped cap, slightly uneven, because a person did it rather than a machine calibrated to do it the same way every time. Hold the sphere up to a light: handmade glass has an uneven wall thickness and silvering that isn't perfectly uniform, small variations that come from a real hand rather than a fixed mechanical pressure. Machine-pressed glass is lifelessly consistent all the way around, which sounds like a compliment until you realize it means nobody was there.

Where Are German Glass Ornaments Made Today?

German glass ornaments are still made in Lauscha, Germany, and by glassblowers trained in the Lauscha technique elsewhere in Europe, including the ones who make Chive Studio's.

We don't blow the glass ourselves. We commission glassblowers working the traditional Lauscha technique — the same slow, human process, just not happening in our building — because there is a real difference between a handmade ornament and one that came off a press, and we'd rather source the real thing than fake it. It's worked out well enough that our pieces have ended up in the gift shops at the Toronto International Film Festival, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which is a strange sentence to type about a Christmas ornament, and also one we're going to keep bringing up until someone tells us to stop.

Chive Studio's ornament range runs to over 200 designs, every one mouth-blown and hand-painted.

The full range is in our glass Christmas ornaments collection.

How to Store Christmas Ornaments

To store Christmas ornaments, wrap each piece in acid-free tissue, use a partitioned box, and keep it out of attics and basements where heat and damp attack the silvering.

Never wrap them in old newspaper; the acidic newsprint ink will chemically tattoo itself onto Santa's face forever, leaving you with a ruined heirloom. Wrap each sphere in acid-free tissue paper and nestle them into padded, partitioned boxes. Keep them far away from the attic, where summer heat bakes the internal silvering until it flakes off inside like golden dandruff, and out of damp basements, where humidity rusts the metal caps into a sad, orange crust.

You spend your hard-earned money on paper-thin glass spheres only to hang them on a drying, sap-bleeding pine tree inside a house packed with hyperactive dogs, sugar-crazed toddlers, and relatives who've had three gin-and-tonics before 4:00 PM. It makes no sense on paper. But that terrifying, heart-in-your-throat fragility is the entire point. In a modern world built almost entirely out of indestructible plastic, a real glass ornament asks for your complete, nervous devotion — right up until someone's elbow catches a low-hanging branch.