The Unbreakable Christmas Tradition
An immigrant inventor finds success in America with intricate, indestructible bead trees once commissioned by European royalty.
The story, cleaned up
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If nature's supply of Christmas trees gives out, there will still be trees as long as a certain German woman remains alive. Out of green beads, wire, and tiny woven ornaments, she constructs miniature trees that once graced the court of King Ludwig of Bavaria and amused the children of Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany. Since coming to America, she has made them for various well-known people. One of the advantages, she says, is that they are almost indestructible. They may be bent, crushed, and packed into small compass, and when they are wanted again, it is only necessary to straighten the branches into their original shape. The inventor, who learned the craft in Munich schools fifty or sixty years ago, creates the trees by threading countless tiny green beads onto slender wires. She binds them together in threes, forming the trefoils into branches, then twists them into a tapering trunk. She trims them with tiny candles and ornaments and fixes them in a base of sand and melted wax. She once sent a tree to President Roosevelt, who was surprised he could not accept it due to regulations, leading the inventor's daughter to quip, 'I expect he thinks he is packing dynamite.'
“I expect he thinks he is packing dynamite.”
While plastic, mass-produced trees eventually dominated the market, the mid-19th-century craft of beaded ornamentals reflects a time when household decor was painstakingly hand-wrought. This local business notice highlights the cultural import of immigrant artisans in the Pacific Northwest during the early 20th century.
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