Thank you and Donald so much!
I remember those little NOMA trees with the plastic bases and a bubble lite at the end of the branches. Some had artificial needles and other were more of a molded arm type branch made to look like it was heavily flocked with snow. One was on a counter in a business in Ottawa, IL, when I was 4 and I still remember it. Nothing gave a tree the shimmering appearance that bubble lites produced. The collection is amazing and your comments are as bright and delightful as any of the lights. How does Donald keep it all clean and dust free? Were drop clothes taken down so that you could take pictures?
I have to tell you that modern Christmas decorations, at least the ones I see for the mass market, look like junk. They are made for people with no taste. Have they stopped producing the silvered glass hand-blown ornaments in Germany and Eastern Europe that used to be so beautiful? When I see the dreck they hang on UGLY artificial trees in the offices, it make me want to hurl. How can such an important holiday in the Christian religion be celebrated with such cheap, ugly, tacky decorations?
If you want to see beautiful Christmas trees look in magazines from the 40s and 50s, when illustrators did them instead of photographers. Illustrators could produce the apotheosis of the Christmas Tree. Old moves also have great trees. The office tree in the library in the movie DESK SET is beautiful. The dressing rooms on the set towards the end of HOLIDAY INN feature beautiful trees, but I guess, like the appliances in a movie, they are either noticed and loved or not noticed at all. One of the great things about Christmas trees in older movies is that they used the old C6, C7 and C9 bulbs. I am a captive of the time in which I grew up and nothing beats them.
I am going to be chauvinistic here and say that I believe the most beautiful trees I have ever seen were trimmed by gay men and it can help if the man is Jewish. There is nothing like working out the frustration of wanting a tree all through childhood as you decorate one of your own, or a friend's tree you help trim. Think of the beautiful trees in businesses trimmed by gay staff of the display department or wealthy homes where a florist is called in to do the tree.