COLLECTION #127: Christmas Odds & Ends

This is my last Christmas collection for you this season, but never fear, I will have more photos of my Christmas stuff over the weekend for my Weekend Collector feature. (I do have more collections to share, but there's just not enough days to show it off!)

This collection is really not a collection at all.. it's just some odds & ends that I have that don't quite meet the criteria for a collection. So I put them all together into one mishmash, because they are special and I wanted to share them.

 The first one is the lovely pink angel.  I begged my Mom for this angel from our family collection for years, and she finally gave it to me about ten years ago. We bought it back in the mid-fifties in our 'pink Christmas' stage. I adore it! I love how the skirt is made of plastic bristles, and how cute her little wooden face it. There used to be quite a lot of glitter on it, but it's mostly gone now.

So wrong, somehow!

The second is the cute li'l Christmas elves which spell out the word 'NOEL'. They are candle holders, and I actually still have the original candles for them, with little holly leaves and berries sculpted in. But they are mishapen and fragile, so I keep them packed away, and use regular little white candles now.  These were also our family's decorations from the late '50s. When we got these, my oldest sister had a guy friend that used to hang out at our house. His name was Leon, and so every year I turned the elves around to spell 'LEON'. It became a family tradition. Mom put them up correctly, I switched them around.  I managed to snag these for our own home many years ago, and since our own family had another dear family friend named Leon, we did the annual switcharoo. It seems odd to see them spell the word NOEL. It just looks wrong, somehow!

Much better!

Isn't that fabric adorable? Mid-century modern Santas on turquoise just seem perfect, and that Roy Rogers fabric! I have quite a lot of the Santa fabric, and a few years ago, I covered a bulletin board with it, to display my vintage Christmas cards. I'll show you a photo of it over the weekend.

 There are a couple of little Christmas boxes: one is actually from the early 20th century, and held Christmas gift tags. The other is a fun 1950s match box. You can see them in the top photo.

Last is the fun Glass Wax Christmas stencil pack. These are actually from the 60s, but they were very popular in the 50s and 60s. Back then, Glass Wax was a product for cleaning glass. Someone, sometime discovered that the thick substance could be used to create patterns on windows and mirrors, and Glass Wax took full advantage, developing holiday stencil packs and patterns so that children could easily create works of art in their homes. I've included a great photo from the early '60s of my husband Bruce's home... note the fabulous aluminum Christmas tree and the Glass Wax stencils on the windows.

Here's a layout I did showing a little of my own family's 1950s Christmas. The small photos were taken the Christmas of 1956 at our home in South Pasadena, CA. The photo of Santa and me was taken at the Broadway department store in Van Nuys, CA, Christmas 1957.