For some winter holiday enthusiasts, the season just wouldn’t be the same without buying a new collectible ornament or two.
This is the essential gift for people looking to round out a collection or mark a personal milestone like “baby’s first Christmas.”
But collectibles experts advise anyone who wants a seriously precious holiday trinket to bypass anything mass produced and go directly to an antiques dealer.
“I once sold an ornament for $1,200,” says Cindy Adams, a Littleton dealer who specializes in Victorian Christmas decorations. “The very earliest ornaments were made by families in Germany because that’s where Christmas (decorating) started. They would take them into town for the Christmas market.”
She says the late 1800s were the heyday for German Christmas ornaments, which are available on eBay and at antiques shows through vendors such as Adams.
But many people who shop for collectible Christmas baubles simply like to have a new, dated ornament each year.
“Most of our business is repeat customers,” says Leon Seifert of C&L Collectibles in Kansas, which specializes in Precious Moments products. Seifert and his wife, Connie, also are Precious Moments collectors who have a devoted room in their home to about 3,000 porcelain pieces.
The most Seifert has ever seen anyone pay for a Precious Moments Christmas ornament was $135, and that was for a single, hard-to- find piece from the company’s discontinued “Twelve Days of Christmas” series.
By and large, new dated holiday ornaments mark an occasion, says Amy Myers with Things Remembered. “There are people who come back every year for their kids or nieces and nephews,” she says.
Myers gives an ornament to her son each year, and her mother covets an annual dated bell ornament.
These types of holiday mementos, she says, are for “people who want to create traditions with their families.”
