'Tis the season for Christmas collectibles

Christine Schultze, Deutsche Presse-Angentur, Germany

After some tough years following German unification, the small town of Lauscha in the rugged woodlands of eastern Germany is a veritable boomtown, cashing in on Christmas collectibles.

The steep and cobblestoned streets of this hilly town are lined with fake boughs of holly and twinkling lights and they are thronged with tourists gaping into display windows aglow with Christmas cheer.

Christmas tree ornaments in every shape, size and color gleam and glint and beg to be bought and taken home and treasured by future generations round the tree.

Glass, of course. Not plastic. Not resin poured into a mold and mass produced.

Hand-made, artisan-blown glass Christmas ornaments, just the way they were made more than 100 years ago when Lauscha was the world's leading glass ornament manufacturing center.

This is where glass Christmas ornaments were invented in the early 19th Century. The woods provided the firewood, the sandy hills were rich in silicon for glass-blowing, which became a cottage industry here. Literally so.

Families would operate glass-blowing workshops in their homes. The whole family would take part, with the menfolk operating the bellows and turning the glowing bulbs of molten glass in the flame, the womenfolk painting and packaging the ornaments, and the children helping to sort them for shipping.

But it was the introduction of gas-lighting in the 1870s which really put Lauscha on the map. Gas-fired burners operate at far higher temperatures than bellows-fired ones, enabling artisans to create much larger, more ornate decorations.

By the end of the 19th century, orders were coming in from throughout the world. Woolworth's was one of the biggest customers, ordering ornaments by the hundreds of thousands. Those became so familiar to people in Britain and America that most people assumed they were domestically produced.

But two world wars virtually wiped out the German glass ornament industry -- to the delight of glass blowers in Britain, America and Asia who gladly jumped into the lurch.

Lauscha was on the Communist side of the Iron Curtain. After initial hesitation, Communist rulers overlooked ideology and began rebuilding the Christmas decoration industry - hoping to re-assert Lauscha's traditional claim.

Ironically, East German-made Christmas ornaments were a major source of export revenues for the Communist country during the Cold War. But after German unification, Communist state subsidies vanished and the glass blowers of Lauscha were left to fend for themselves in the fierce global market for Christmas decorations.

But as luck would have it, Christmas became big business in the 1990s. Now anything which could conceivably be called a "Christmas collectible" can find a buyer, particularly in America where nearly every shopping mall has a store selling nothing else all year round.

And Germans are slowing getting bitten by the Christmas collectibles bug themselves, with Yuletide shops becoming a familiar site in quaint German tourist towns. If nothing else, German merchants realize Christmas is a money-maker, especially in towns popular with American tourists.

And one of those towns is Lauscha, the ultimate destination for devout collectors of all things Christmassy.

"We get 40 to 100 customers a day -- paying customers," says Sieglinde Thorwirth, who runs the Thuringian Christmas Market in the next-door hamlet of Zella-Mehlis.

The 100-square-meter shop she runs with her husband Joachim is overflowing year-round with tree decorations, nativity scenes, angels of all sizes, porcelain bells, dainty music boxes -- and Santas of every description.

"We dispense with Christmas carols," she notes. "That's our concession to summer. We go for ambient music instead. But come the autumn, it's back to the carols."

The novelty of shopping for Christmas decorations in the dog days of August apparently also spurs some customers to pay just a little bit more than they had planned on.

"We had a family come in the other day in shorts and T-shirts and they got off on the fun of sifting through Christmas ornaments to such an extent that they ended up buying two big crates of decorations, enough for a 10-foot-tall tree," said Thorwirth.

Bus tour groups make regular excursions to Lauscha and the town also has a host of "regulars" -- die-hard collectors who descend on Lauscha in summer in order to get first pick of the season's newest offerings.

"The season is well underway for us," says Cathrin Rueger, whose Krebs Glas Lauscha GmbH is one of the most well-established purveyors of glass ornaments for the American market.

And what are the fashions for the well turned-out Christmas tree for 2001?

"This year's look can be summed up with two words: 'Frozen Aubergine'," Rueger says. "Burgundies and aubergine colors are going to be the big sellers. And the 'frozen' effect with applied glass shavings is a lovely touch."

And a preview of Christmas 2002?

"Not yet," she replies coyly. "Let's not rush things."