Page 18 - JOA 12-20

Candle tree in blue and gold from
Gale & Friends, $30-50

O

Christmas

Tree

And the Inspired

Collectible

Christmas Tree Pins

Story & Photos by Donald-Brian Johnson

hat do you do on the day after Thanksgiving? Some folks start baking Christmas cookies (or
eating them). Others begin unraveling myriad strings of Christmas lights in preparation for the
Wannual holiday decorating marathon.
And then there are those who don their first Christmas tree pins of the season.
If sweaters festooned with sequined reindeer aren’t quite your cup of Christmas tea, Christmas tree
pins provide a more subtle, yet equally sparkly, salute to the season. Since the mid-twentieth
century, their glittering blend of brilliant metal and glistening gemstones has made them yuletide’s most
popular jewelry (just check out the thousands—yes thousands—listed for sale daily on eBay.)
No two Christmas tree pins are quite alike. Season after season, from
Thanksgiving right up until Christmas Day (and spilling over into those
twelve days after), collectors can pin on an entire forest of Christmas tree
pins, without ever once being stabbed by a repeat. They’re quite literally
the gift that keeps on giving.
But long before the pins came the trees that inspired them.

Timber! The Christmas Tree
According to legend, the Christmas tree was a Martin Luther
brainstorm. Sparkling stars, seen through the limbs of a forest fir,
prompted Luther to place candles on the branches of a tree at his own
home, recapturing the starry effect.
Prince Albert, the German husband of Queen Victoria,
brought the Christmas tree tradition to England. An 1848
Illustrated News holiday portrait of the Royal Family, complete
with a decorated tree (left), gave the custom widespread attention;
by 1850, its popularity had spread to America.
For those whose childhoods spanned the 1950s and ‘60s when
Christmas tree pins were enjoying their first heyday, the most
familiar Christmas tree was a traditional towering green one. Laden with
tinsel, dripping with ornaments, and bedecked with ungainly colored
light bulbs, the green tree was the baby boomer’s ideal.
Unlike today, most green trees of the period were “real,” although artificial trees had
been introduced as early as 1950 by the Addis Brush Company. (Addis also manufactured a

16 Journal of Antiques and Collectibles