Traditional Christmas Tree Ornaments

From minimalist designs to glitz and glamour, modern Christmas ornaments might not be what you’re looking for when it comes to decorating your tree. If you want a more traditional look that reminds you of childhood Christmases, Old World Christmas has you covered. We have an incredible selection of vintage Christmas ornaments in many styles and designs.

Our traditional Christmas tree ornaments resemble ornaments you might have seen on trees decades ago. Or maybe you’ve seen ornaments that were popular way back in the 19th century and early 20th century. These ornaments, usually made of glass, had hand-painted designs that gave them a unique look. At Old World Christmas, we’ve perfected techniques from the 1800s to bring you traditional ornaments with that hand-crafted quality.

Here Come Santa Claus Ornaments

Our vintage Christmas ornaments wouldn’t be complete without Santa himself. We have a wide range of antique Christmas decorations featuring Santa in various designs. From Santa climbing down a chimney to Santa enjoying a round of golf, you can find the ideal Santa ornament for your tree. Our vintage ornaments include Santa in traditional bright red and white, Old World Santa in gold and pastel colors, and midnight Santa in deep blue.

You can also find vintage Santa ornaments with Santa-related themes, like milk and cookies set out on Christmas Eve, Santa’s famous hat, or even a bag of coal for those who’ve been naughty. Looking for Santa ornaments with a specific style? We’ve got mid-century Santas, Nordic Santas, and Santas playing pickleball and fly fishing. Every Santa ornament is crafted by hand using tried and true techniques from the olden days.

Christmas scenes are usually a winter wonderland filled with glittery snow. Whether you live in a real-world winter wonderland or a warmer climate, bring some snowy cheer into your home with our vintage Christmas decorations. Our collection includes snowman and snowflake ornaments designed to have an antique look. Crisp white tones, light blues, and other colors are carefully painted on each ornament to give it an eye-catching look.

Our snowman ornaments have fun designs to choose from, like a snowman with candy canes, a snowman with adorable pets, and a baby snow angel with a teddy bear. We also have frosty elf icicles, crystal snowflakes for an elegant touch, and a snow family in different sizes. No matter what kind of snowy design you want for your Christmas ornaments, you can find beautifully crafted vintage ornaments in our collection.

Noble Nutcrackers for Your Tree

Nutcrackers are one of the most recognizable Christmas symbols. You might already have nutcracker figures on tables and other surfaces throughout your home. Why not add them to your tree? At Old World Christmas, our vintage Christmas ornaments include nutcracker designs in vivid colors. Each Nutcracker ornament is painted in colors that stay vibrant over the years, so you don’t have to worry about fading.

We’ve got traditional nutcracker ornaments standing at attention in a red jacket. We also have mini nutcracker ornaments that pair well with our other miniature Christmas ornaments, like reindeer and Santa. We even have a Nutcracker Suite Collection with characters from the famous ballet, including Clara, the Mouse King, a Sugar Plum Fairy, Drosselmayer, and, of course, the Nutcracker Prince.

Looking for vintage Christmas decorations with a religious theme? Old World Christmas has a beautiful selection of these, including nativity sets and angels. Honor the reason Christmas is celebrated with a nativity collection that includes the Holy Family, angels, wise men, shepherds, camel, donkey, cow, and sheep. These blown-glass ornaments give you everything you need to decorate your tree with a religious theme this Christmas.

We also have individual religious ornaments in an old-fashioned design. Our collection includes baby Jesus lying in a manger, a glistening angel, the Holy Family, and a holy cross. Choose a ginger nativity scene for your tree to combine a religious theme with a traditional gingerbread design. If you celebrate Hanukkah, our vintage ornaments include a dreidel, menorah, and Star of David.

Vintage Ornament Designs for Old-Fashioned Elegance

At Old World Christmas, our antique Christmas decorations include traditional ornament styles. Our vintage reflection ornaments can give you tree old-world appeal with vivid shades of red, green, and blue. We also have festive bird ornaments for the holidays, including a partridge in a pear tree and two turtledoves. Our vintage ornament collection also includes characters from holiday classics, like Rudolph and the Bumble.

From Christmas wreaths and trees to candles and candy canes, you can find an impressive selection of traditional holiday themes and designs to choose from. Purchase blown-glass ornaments in a certain theme, or mix and match for a more eclectic look for your tree.

ornament, in architecture, any element added to an otherwise merely structural form, usually for purposes of decoration or embellishment. Three basic and fairly distinct categories of ornament in architecture may be recognized: mimetic, or imitative, ornament, the forms of which have certain definite meanings or symbolic significance; applied ornament, intended to add beauty to a structure but extrinsic to it; and organic ornament, inherent in the building’s function or materials.

Mimetic ornament is by far the most common type of architectural ornament in primitive cultures, in Eastern civilizations, and generally throughout antiquity. It grows out of what seems to be a universal human reaction to technological change: the tendency to use new materials and techniques to reproduce shapes and qualities familiar from past usage, regardless of appropriateness. For example, most common building types in antiquity, such as tombs, pyramids, temples, and towers, began as imitations of primeval house and shrine forms. An obvious example is the dome, which developed as a permanent wooden or stone reproduction of a revered form originally built of pliable materials. In the mature stages of early civilizations, building types tended to evolve past primitive prototypes; their ornament, however, usually remained based on such models. Decorative motifs derived from earlier structural and symbolic forms are innumerable and universal. In developed Indian and Chinese architecture, domical and other originally structural forms occur often and lavishly as ornament. In ancient Egypt, architectural details continued throughout history to preserve faithfully the appearance of bundled papyrus shafts and similar early building forms. In Mesopotamia, brick walls long imitated the effect of primitive mud-and-reed construction. In the carved stone details of Greco-Roman orders (capitals, entablatures, moldings), the precedent of archaic construction in wood was always clearly discernible.

Architectural ornament in classical Greece exemplified the common tendency for mimetic ornament to turn into applied ornament, which lacks either symbolic meaning or reference to the structure on which it is placed. By the 5th century bc in Greece, the details of the orders had largely lost whatever conscious symbolic or structural significance they may have had; they became simply decorative elements extrinsic to the structure. The Doric frieze is a good case: its origin as an imitation of the effect of alternating beam ends and shuttered openings in archaic wood construction remained evident, but it came to be treated as a decorative sheath without reference to the actual structural forms behind. In losing their mimetic character, the details of the Greek orders acquired a new function, however; they served to articulate the building visually, organizing it into a series of coordinated visual units that could be comprehended as an integrated whole, rather than a collection of isolated units. This is the concept of applied decoration which was passed on through the Greco-Roman period. The triumphal arch of Rome, with its system of decorative columns and entablature articulating what is essentially one massive shape, is a particularly good illustration. Most of the great architecture of the Renaissance and Baroque periods depends on applied ornament; to a large extent, the difference between these styles is the difference in decoration.

Judicious and intelligent use of applied ornament remained characteristic of most Western architecture until the 19th century. During the Victorian period, architectural ornament and architectural forms proper tended to part company, to be designed quite independently of each other. Since it became obvious that ornament so conceived served no good purpose at all, a reaction was inevitable; it began to appear in force by the 1870s.

As early as the 1870s H.H. Richardson adopted the Romanesque style less for its historical associations than for the opportunities it afforded him to express the nature and texture of stone. In mature examples of his architecture from the mid-1880s, ornament in the older, applied sense has virtually disappeared, and buildings depend for their aesthetic effect mainly on the inherent qualities of their materials. The generation following Richardson saw a further development of this principle everywhere.