Choosing Christmas decorations by shape and material
Traditional Christmas decorations earn that name through what they depict rather than solely the colour they come in, and depiction is the most useful way to choose between them. Ours gather around a few familiar subjects. There are the winter animals: robins, reindeer, hares and penguins. There are the nursery figures, rocking horses and Father Christmas among them. There is the carol imagery of angels and bells. And there are natural forms, pine cones and fallen leaves cast in metal. Each is a shape that has meant Christmas for generations, which is why one of them still reads as festive in a room that is otherwise quiet.
Most Christmas ornaments are bought a few at a time, over several years, and that is how the best displays get built. Mixing is the point, and our designs are made to be combined. What holds a mix together is one thread running through it: a motif that recurs, a narrow palette, or the simple fact that so much of it is finished by hand. Get that thread right, and you can add to the mix for years without it ever looking accidental.
Materials do the second half of the work, because the same motif changes character depending on how it is made. A felt robin is soft and matt. The same bird in glazed stoneware is crisp, weightier and quietly formal. Mouthblown glass is lighter again. One motif in two or three materials is the simplest route to a display with depth to it. For dressing the tree specifically, our Christmas tree decorations and baubles collection goes further into that.
How our Christmas decorations are made
Much of what is here passes through someone's hands at a point where a machine could have done the job faster, and it shows in the small differences between one piece and the next. The papier
mâché baubles are formed in the traditional way by skilled artisans and then hand-painted, so the brushwork on one Father Christmas is never exactly the brushwork on the next. The felt figures are cut from natural felt and finished with hand-stitched detail, some of them made in the Netherlands. The beaded
decorations begin as a wool body with a foam fill and are then hand-beaded and stitched, which is slow work and looks it in the best possible way.
The stoneware pieces carry a speckled glaze applied by hand, so the pattern of the speckle belongs to that piece and no other. Even the rattan tree skirt is handwoven. The glass baubles are mouthblown into shape rather than pressed in a mould, which is why the ripple running through the surface varies from one to the next.
The consequence is worth saying plainly. These are traditional Christmas decorations that reward being looked at closely, which is not something a printed or moulded Christmas ornament ever
asks you to do.
Where traditional Christmas decorations go beyond the tree
Traditional Christmas decorations end up on the tree by default, but it is rarely the only place they belong. Brass bells strung on natural twine can be looped around door handles, so they sound
quietly as people pass through. A ceramic angel sits well on a mantelpiece or a windowsill, seen at eye level rather than from below. Hanging Christmas decorations do not need a tree at all: cut branches in a vase will carry stoneware birds and hanging baubles, and make a quieter display in a hallway or on a side
table. Velvet stockings and sacks hang over a mantelpiece or a stair rail. A rattan skirt goes at the foot of the tree, where it hides the base.
Our design director, Fred, makes the same argument about shelves. Curate a bookshelf for Christmas with seasonal
accessories, winter sprigs, glassware and ceramic accents, and it becomes a festive display in its own right. The principle is that decorations work hardest where people already look, which is why a hallway, a mantelpiece and a bookshelf are worth dressing before the corners of a room are.
