At one time 95 percent of the glass tree ornaments used on American Christmas trees came from the immediate vicinity of Lauscha, near Nuremberg, Germany. Here, Louis Greiner-Schlotfeger invented the glass Christmas ball. Glass making began here in the 1590's when religious persecution forced groups of Protestant glass makers to leave their homes in Bavaria and go east to the Thuringian mountains. There they found an abundance of wood, sand, and limestone, the necessary ingredients for their craft.

Soon Lauscha became a center for making drinking glasses and bulls-eye window glass. By the middle of the 18th century, Lauscha’s glassblowers had begun to make glass beads. Soon the demands of the fashion industry made glass beads into the town’s number-one business.

But by 1845 glassblowers in Bohemia began to produce superior beads. Overnight the village lost most of its bead market to Bohemia. Fighting hard times, Louis Greiner-Schlotfeger began blowing thick-walled glass balls known as kugels, which he silvered with the Bohemian silver mirroring solution that he duplicated. These were heavy, plainly colored pieces, shaped as balls and fruits. Even though they appeared on every Christmas tree in Lauscha, the first record of glass tree balls being produced didn't appear until 1848, when "six dozen of Christmas tree ornaments in three sizes" was recorded in a glassblower's ledger.

While each ornament maker created his wares in a small home workshop using his own designs, his wife took care of silvering the inside of them. After she coated the insides, she would hang them up to dry on long nails in rows from the ceiling over the stove. The following morning she dipped the silver ornaments in various colored lacquers and returned them to their nails to dry. Family members helped paint trimmings, and the youngest child put on the little metal caps. Working 8 to 15 hours a day, often 6 days a week, a family could make from 300 to 600 ornaments a week.

In 1867, a gas works was built in the village and for the first time, Greiner-Schlotfeger and the other glassblowers had a steady, very hot, easily adjustable flame which allowed them to make thin-walled bubbles of glass. Using this new heat source, Greiner-Schlotfeger perfected a paper-thin, four-inch version of the old heavy kugel and in 1870, he discovered the idea for molded glass ornaments by blowing a bubble of glass into a pine-cone-shaped cookie mold.

By 1880, full-sized trees decorated with expensive imported German glass ornaments became the rage with the elite. American F. W. Woolworth reluctantly agreed to display a few imported German glass ornaments to his Lancaster, Pennsylvania, store in 1880. To his amazement, his original $25 shipment sold out in two days. By 1890, he was traveling to Germany to select his wares. Soon customers added one or two of these special ornaments to their paper or fabric tree decorations.

An enormous variety of ornaments―from over 5,000 different molds―came out of Lauscha between 1870 and 1940. Some glassblowers blew by hand. But the ultimate design was a free-blown eight-inch stork that stood majestically on a Christmas tree branch.

Some of the glassblowers specialized in free-blowing the "tree tops" shaped like the spike on a Prussian officer's helmet. They also experimented with new ways to decorate their creations and came up with etching the glass surface to give their ornaments a frosted appearance.

Soon the technical knowledge of making glass ornaments spread to Bohemia (later part of Czechoslovakia) and Russia. The glassmakers of Bohemia, long known for their sparkling red glass, adopted bead making to strings of beads for Christmas trees. They began making ornaments by the end of the 19^th century and soon competed head on with the Germans.

The celebration of Christmas had always been big in Russia until the Communists came into power after the revolution in 1917. They made Christmas into an atheistic holiday and banned Christmas trees. However, in the early 1920's, Lenin, realizing that his badly floundering economy was about to go under, permitted some private enterprise. One of the first cottage industries to emerge featured hand blown, hand painted glass Christmas ornaments picturing fanciful images of Grandfather Frost, the Snow Maiden and other popular Russian folk tale figures. Glassblowers created individually handblown ornaments from the early 1920s to the 1960s.. Even those of the same kind were silvered and painted entirely by hand by different artists.

The pine cone was, by far, the most popular design. Other favorites were Santas, birds, nuts, flowers, clusters of grapes, and musical instruments such as drums and violins. Glassblowers experimented with geometric designs, too, most of them intricate and ingenious variations on the basic ball shape.

It was typical to make a single design, such as an acorn or a tulip, in three different sizes, all exact replicas. Only a large collection of old ornaments can reflect the seemingly endless number of molds made between the 1880s and 1940. Manufacturers offered new designs each season to stimulate business and many of the rarest of them today most likely were produced for a single season by a single man.

Today, there's been a resurgence of interest in the old designs and many reproductions are available. Tim and Beth Merck of Spokane, Washington, founded Merck Family's Old World Christmas in 1979. This couple shares a special love for Christmas, especially its rich traditions in the European style. Today, the Merck Family's Old World Christmas is the leading distributor of quality glass ornaments in the U.S. Each glass ornament produced for the Merck Family's Old World Christmas is hand crafted in age-old traditions. Molten glass is mouth-blown into finely created molds, which are available only to the company, before being hand-painted and finished. Each ornament is authentically created with the same techniques originated in the 1800's, thus making it difficult to tell them from the originals.

The market is strong. Old glass ornaments sell from $10 to $500-600 each. Tthe ornament's age, color, condition and manufacturer determines the price. Unfortunately, the detail of the painting is often flaking off and mint pieces are becoming harder to find. But when a collector does find one, it can make it seem like Christmas no matter what day of the year it is.

Collectors can stay in touch and learn more about antique ornaments through organizations such as the Golden Glow of Christmas Past, a national club for people who collect antique Christmas decorations. Another popular group is COOL (Collecting Ornaments On-Line) Collectors Club, a virtual collectors' club. Groups like these are an invaluable aid to the novice collector.