Our story begins long ago at a little glass-blowing village in the Thuringian Mountains of Germany called Lauscha. For centuries Lauscha’s artisans worked molten glass like bakers kneading dough—heating tubes, puffing in air, and shaping delicate spheres and other shapes. What began as beads and small ornaments eventually morphed into what’s now affectionately referred to as classic Christmas “baubles.”
Christmas trees had long been bedecked with edibles like nuts, fruit, and candy. But in the mid-1800s, the first glass ornaments appeared—at first simply mimicking apples or walnuts, later evolving beyond round into stars, angels, bells and beyond.
In the 1840s a spark to the flame of Christmas lit up the holiday. The crowned royals of Britain, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (of German roots) had their Christmas tree illustrated and published in a newspaper, dripping with glass ornaments and lit candles. That image turned the Christmas tree into a festive must-have for fashionable society, setting the stage for a global ornament craze.
Lauscha (where there’s still a Christmas festival today honoring their glass production) and its neighboring glass-making hubs exploded production. Once mostly bespoke, glass ornaments became fairly regular exports by the late-1800s. The rise of better glassblowing techniques due to industrial advances like gasworks at Lauscha around 1867 made thinner, lighter, cheaper ornaments feasible.
By the 1880s, American retail caught the trend. Five-and-dime retailer F.W. Woolworth Company began stocking German-made glass ornaments, putting the glowing spheres into countless living rooms across the U.S.
Just like that, once-exotic European craftsmanship became part of American tradition. Families who couldn’t afford candy or nuts for their trees could now spend a dime or two on a shiny glass bauble. Soon, imports diversified. In addition to Germany, delicate ornament production soon began in Poland, Bohemia (later Czechoslovakia), and other parts of Eastern Europe with skilled glass-blowing traditions and a tradition of holiday decorating.
With increasing global ornament supply, U.S. homes had more styles and colors. And it wasn’t just glass balls. The shimmering tinsel we vacuum up for half of January also comes from the same German cultural mix. This original metallic decoration known in German as Lametta dates to around 1610, invented near Nuremberg. Originally made of real silver leaf, it was meant to mimic frosty icicles or angelic light dancing in a tree’s candle glow. When silver became expensive, less costly aluminum, copper, and then lead were used.
As ornaments became more widespread in Europe, Lametta grew in popularity. By the late-19th century, tinsel was showing up on many German trees—and soon after, carried over by immigrants to North America. There’s also folklore tied to the origin of tinsel: some Eastern European traditions (notably among Ukrainians and in parts of Poland) told of a “spider-web” miracle, where the Christ Child turned spider webs into silver to reward a poor family that couldn’t decorate their tree—explaining the idea of gleaming silver strands on a fir tree.
So between glass baubles, tinsel, candles (or later, lights), the Christmas tree went from fruit-and-candle to truly glittering.
Our tale takes a very American twist in the 20th century. One major player was a German immigrant named Max Eckardt, who had been importing glass ornaments since the early-1900s. With war clouds gathering over Europe in the 1930s he saw trouble ahead for ornament supply. In 1937, he partnered with Corning Glass Works to produce glass ornaments domestically—initially using machinery meant for light bulbs—and launched the brand Shiny Brite. Suddenly, once-rare German-style ornaments could be mass-produced for sale in department stores, not just through specialty import channels.
When World War II cut off ornament imports from Europe, Shiny Brite and other U.S. producers hustled. The glass balls from Corning were shipped to factories (often in New Jersey or New York) for painting or stenciling, packed and shipped to stores across America. The result: millions of trees decked out for Christmas—and a whole generation of Americans grew up thinking of glass baubles and tinsel as an essential part of Christmas.
This trans-Atlantic ornament journey wasn’t just about selling pretty balls. It’s a story of cultural exchange, immigration, craftsmanship, and adaptation. What started as a small-town German craft turned into a holiday staple for American homes. And there’s something magical about it. Every glass ornament you carefully unwrap from an old box—maybe dusty, maybe cracked—carries a little bit of Lauscha’s smoke-blackened glass furnaces, a tinsel maker’s silver-leaf scissors, and the memory of immigrants hoping to recreate “home for the holidays” across the ocean.
Next week: more American holiday history.