Lobster Dinner Ornament

Chive sells the Lobster Dinner ornament directly through this site, and it ships from our own stock rather than through a marketplace listing. My aunt Verna found it at eleven at night and ordered two, a decision she described the following morning as insurance. The spare is still wrapped in a drawer, insured against nothing anyone has been able to identify. She checks on it.

It is, largely because the format is wrong in the right way. A full plated dinner with garnish coming out of a stocking is funnier than anything actually designed for a stocking, and it takes the room a second to catch up. Verna held hers up for ten full seconds before anybody worked out what they were looking at. That pause is the whole gift.

Buy it for the person who orders the most involved thing on the menu and then eats all of it. Verna qualifies on both counts and considers a shared plate a form of cowardice. She has never once asked what anyone else was having, because the answer would not change her order and she sees no reason to collect information she cannot use. Confidence, essentially.

It is mouth-blown in one piece, then hand-painted, with the dish and its trim shaped in the same heat before the glass sets. The shell red goes on in passes so the claws keep an edge at a distance. Verna, who has taken apart a great many lobsters, checked the joint where the tail meets the body and pronounced the proportions defensible. High praise from her.

It measures 2.5 inches wide and 4 inches tall, so it reads as a whole plate rather than a suggestion of one. That is wide for an ornament and it needs a branch that will take the spread without dropping the far edge. Verna solved this by moving three other things and did not ask first, which is the usual arrangement. She was right.

Dust it with a dry soft brush and leave water out of it entirely, particularly around the painted lemon and the garnish, where a damp cloth will lift detail over time. Verna cleans hers with a makeup brush she has designated for the purpose and keeps in the same drawer, handle labeled. There is a system, and I am not in it.

Pair it with the other special-occasion pieces rather than the everyday ones — the things you would never eat twice in a week. A champagne bottle, a whole turkey, a cake. Verna arranges her tree in tiers of formality, working down from the plated dinners to the snacks, and she has strong views about which branch the fries belong on. Low, obviously.

Yes. It travels in a fitted insert inside a double-walled carton, which is transit protection rather than presentation, so whoever receives it will be doing their own wrapping. Verna considers this correct on the grounds that unwrapping something twice dilutes it. She kept the carton anyway, flattened, in the hall cupboard where she keeps all the good cartons. There are eleven.