German Glass Ornaments: How They're Made, and How to Keep Them Alive

What "German Glass Ornaments" Actually Means

German glass ornaments aren't really a country of origin, they're a method — blow, silver, lacquer, paint, cap — and the method has not meaningfully changed in two hundred years, which puts it in the extremely small category of things that have outlasted my New Year's resolutions, my last three phones, and one marriage I won't get into here. Everything you picture when you picture a "real" glass ornament — the thin walls, the glow from somewhere inside the glass, the slightly crooked hand-painted face on a Santa who looks like he's had a week — comes from that same technique, wherever the person actually holding the blowpipe happens to be standing.

How a Glass Ornament Is Actually Made

It starts with a glass tube, heated over a flame until it stops behaving like glass and starts behaving like something that wants to be talked into a shape, then either free-blown into a bulb or blown into a mold if the design has opinions of its own — a bird, a pinecone, a tiny camera, whatever someone decided the world needed hanging on a tree this year. Once it's cooled, the actual transformation happens where you can't see it: according to the Corning Museum of Glass, the inside gets swirled with a silver nitrate and sugar water solution, which is the entire reason a glass ornament glows instead of just sitting there being a slightly festive lightbulb that peaked in 1962. Nobody ever thinks about the silvering. The silvering is doing all the work, quietly, the way a good stage manager does all the work while the actors take the bow. After that comes a dip in colored lacquer, then hand-painting for whatever detail the design calls for, and finally a metal cap, crimped on by an actual hand and not glued by someone checking their phone. Every single step is still a person making a series of small, slightly irreversible decisions, which is a polite way of saying no two ornaments are exactly alike, and also a polite way of saying somebody, somewhere, has definitely ruined a few and quietly recycled the glass and never spoken of it again.

You can see where all of that ends up in our blown glass ornament collection, and across the full glass christmas ornaments collection, where the sequence — blow, silver, lacquer, paint, cap — sits behind every single piece, whether or not the ornament in question is shaped like something that has any business being on a Christmas tree.

Mouth-Blown vs. Machine-Molded: The Physical Differences

This is the part you can check yourself, no training required, no squinting through a loupe like you're appraising a diamond you already suspect is cubic zirconia. A mouth-blown ornament has a slightly uneven wall, because a human being was breathing air into molten glass and not a machine repeating one motion four thousand times an hour with the tireless enthusiasm of something that has never once been tired. That unevenness is exactly what makes the silvering pool unevenly too, which is what gives the glow its depth instead of a flat, showroom shine that says nothing and commits to nothing. Machine-molded ornaments, by contrast, are symmetrical in a way that starts to feel faintly accusatory once you know to look for it — identical walls, identical coating, paint that lines up the same way on every single piece in the box, like a chorus line that has rehearsed the joy right out of itself. We went into the full spotting method on the vintage ornaments piece; the short version is that the flaw is the whole point, and anything too perfect should make you a little suspicious, on ornaments and in general.

Who Makes Ours

Here's the honest version, because the honest version is more interesting than the version where I stand near a kiln for a photo and let you assume things. We do not blow glass at Chive Studio. I have never blown glass. I would be a hazard to myself and everyone within a fifteen-foot radius. Our ornaments are made for us by glassblowers working the traditional German techniques — the same blow-silver-lacquer-paint-cap sequence Lauscha's families have run for generations — and we commission the work rather than pretend to a hot shop we don't have. That relationship turns out to be the actual credential, not a weakness to paper over. TIFF bought a wholesale collection from us last year — film projector, camera, and popcorn ornaments — to sell in their own shop, which means someone at a film festival looked at a tiny glass popcorn bucket and decided it belonged near actual movie people, which remains one of the better compliments this studio has received. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame bought our instrument pieces — acoustic and electric guitars, trumpet — presumably after confirming the ornaments wouldn't embarrass anyone next to actual rock history. The Royal Ontario Museum bought a wholesale collection last year too, dinosaurs among them, which feels like the correct ornament for a natural history crowd and also mildly on the nose. None of that happens because a buyer liked a nice story over coffee. It happens because the ornaments survive being looked at closely by people whose entire professional personality is looking at things closely and finding fault.

How to Store Christmas Ornaments So They Survive January

I will now tell you the correct way to do this, and then I will tell you what I actually do, and you are free to judge me, quietly, the way I judge myself every January while doing it. The correct way: original boxes when you have them, compartmentalized storage boxes when you don't, acid-free tissue instead of newspaper, because newsprint ink migrates onto glass over the years and nobody wants a ceramic Santa slowly developing a faint tattoo of last Tuesday's stock listings. Store the box somewhere with stable temperature — not an attic that goes from meat locker to sauna across a single season, which stresses glass in ways that eventually announce themselves as a crack you find in July for no reason anyone can explain. Caps stay on if the original packaging holds them snug; loose in a box, caps come off, so they don't work themselves sideways against the glass like a shoe that's slowly untying itself for eleven months.

Here is what I actually do. Every year, with a glass of something and the tree half-undressed and Bing Crosby on in the background, I put the ornaments in the box, roughly in the order they come off the branch, apply no further philosophy to the situation, and put the box on the shelf in the closet, because my actual goal next November is to open it and start decorating, not conduct forensic inventory on my own Christmas. It is not luggage. Nobody is putting it through an X-ray machine and asking if I packed it myself. I have lost a few ornaments over the years to this system, and I will not pretend otherwise, but not enough to make me get more precise about it, and there's a real argument that a slightly chaotic box is what makes next year's unpacking feel like an actual discovery instead of a spreadsheet come to life. Every year, without fail, the same records come out for tree-trimming — my father's old Bing Crosby and Sinatra, so worn down at this point that every loud pop through the needle makes me flinch like I've heard a car backfire, a needle, I should mention, that cost more than a fair number of the ornaments it's currently accompanying — and every year the storage box comes down looking exactly as underorganized as I left it, and somehow that consistency has become its own small tradition, possibly the only part of this entire operation that has stayed reliably the same.