Shiny Brite

Shiny Brite

Originally shared by Gene Capps

CHEAP BAUBLES AND A BOY’S LOVE OF CHRISTMAS
When I was a boy my family lived in a small rented house, a plain white box with windows framed by green shutters. The five rooms were barely large enough to fit our family of six, but we made do even though at times it felt like we were living inside a wooden bucket. Our house hugged Spruce Street, a car path of packed clay that doubled as the neighborhood playground. My family’s modest income came on the backs of my devoted and tireless parents, but it enabled us to live comfortably with a few amenities. Since we rented our house, the most expensive item that my parents owned was my dad’s automobile, always bought used but inevitably polished to a mirror shine. The scant furnishings inside the five rooms were basic, solid, practical, without frills. Not totally devoid of familial identity, we did own items of little dollar value that nevertheless helped define us, and thus they were held dear and kept safe. Mom’s blue pressed glass dish, for example, family photographs, a large Bible, war ration books, old needlework, a chair that belonged to a long-ago aunt. Though ordinary and inexpensive, a dozen old glass Christmas tree ornaments was my favorite. Probably considered an extravagance at the time, my parents had purchased the boxed set at Woolworths soon after their marriage when jobs for young men like Dad were scarce and paychecks were meager. The famous 5¢ store chain had been the first to import large lots of the glass baubles from Germany, and millions were sold under the Shiny Brite label at a time when decorated Christmas trees were just becoming an American phenomenon. Each ornament was different, and each was bird-egg fragile, almost translucent. They were painted with stripes, flowers, dots and fans in silver, gold, reds, greens and blues. Today many people would say they are gaudy, but to my innocent and naive imagination gaudy was good. I loved things like the ornaments that chronicled the past and I loved decorating Christmas trees. Through my eyes those old baubles and stings of colored lights could transform any ugly cedar tree into something magical. Hanging the Shiny Brite delicate pieces of glass remained a family tradition as long as a child lived at home, but as time passed one ornament after another fell from the cedars’ tenuous web of needles and shattered. A few of the twelve remain after almost a century of use, and they are hung on my family’s Christmas tree every December. Those ornaments and their shattered kin though purchased for pennies once thrilled a boy and helped kindle his lifelong love of decorating trees at Christmas.