Christmas Gifts 2012 | Best Christmas Gifts | Top Christmas Gifts

Because ornaments are not beeing bought annually (as they are reusable goods) such collections are often passed on and augmented from generation to generation (provided that you don’t have any cats in your hausehold – they just love to play with shiny baubles on a Christmas Tree, that usually results in a complete Christmas-Ornaments-Permanent-Disaster and a bit of mess to clean for you)

Baubles are a kind of Christmas Ornaments which are spherical decorations, commonly used to adorn Christmas trees. They are one of the most popular Christmas ornament designs, and you can be sure to find at least one bauble on virtually any Christmas tree. Baubles can have various paintings on them, ranging from symbols commonly associated with Christmas to you favorite football team.

We can also find an interesting description of various Christmas Ornaments used in the 1870s in the Lucretia P. Hale’s story ‘The Peterkins’ Christmas-Tree’: ‘There was every kind of gilt hanging-thing, from gilt pea-pods to butterflies on springs. There were shining flags and lanterns, and bird-cages, and nests with birds sitting on them, baskets of fruit, gilt apples, and bunches of grapes.”

In the late 1880s, an American merchant Franklin Winfield Woolworth discovered Lauscha’s baubles during his visit to Germany, and he soon made a fortune by importing the German glass Christmas Ornaments to the United States. By the 1920s, the traditional methods of handblowing baubles gave way to mass production, because demand for these decorative Christmas Ornaments grew steadily, especially as new colours regularly became fashionable.

After World War II, the production of baubles in Lauscha ceased. After the Berlin Wall was destroyed, most of the baubles manufatures were reestablished as private firms. These days, there are still more than 20 small glass-blowing companies active in Lauscha, that produce baubles.