All is Shiny, all is Brite

Vintage Shiny Brite Christmas ornaments. They're like crack cocaine to me--I think about them, I dream about them, I simply cannot get enough! I found my first Shiny Brites back before I was even married with a tree to put them on--I had been garage sale-ing with my mom and scored several boxes of the solid colored glass balls, mostly in shades of turquoise and hot pink. When I finally got an aluminum tree (an early Christmas gift from my sweet parents), the turquoise and pink looked perfectly retro with all of that sparkly silver!

Since then, I've been on the never ending, voracious hunt for Shiny Brites. In my experience they've been hard to find so my collection is still small, but one look at the zillions of Shiny Brites for sale on eBay tell me that they're still out there, waiting to be found. The difference is that I wouldn't dream of selling them! I still have mostly plain glass balls but slowly I've been finding more and more of the 'special' ones--those that have stripes or glitter or are a different shape. When I find those at a garage sale or thrift, I don't think I could be more excited if they were diamonds and rubies! They are truly treasures to me.

All of the thrifts around here wait until after Halloween to put their Christmas donations out for sale, so I have to wait to search. Ever since I got home from Silver Bella I've been on a bit of a thrift bender, and I've been lucky in the vintage Christmas department! These were all in one big bag. All of my local thrifts just throw a bunch of stuff in a bag and price it, a dangerous situation for delicate glass balls. Sometimes I get very lucky and find a whole bag full of good stuff like this, but mostly it's a whole bag of crap and one or two good things. Not all of these are Shiny Brites but they are all vintage. I especially love the small boxes of feather tree ornaments.


For me, the graphics on the old ornament boxes are just as appealing as the contents! The ornaments inside this box are nothing special, but the box is great! The dipsticks at the thrift store had crisscrossed the top with clear packing tape and I took a chance, hoping I could use some Un-Du and get the tape off without completely destroying the box. I was mostly successful, but you can see on the edges where the red paper lifted off despite the care I took. Oh well, it's still great and once I glue down that errant flap and fill it with "good" ornaments, it will look great!



More wonderful old graphics! I don't know how, but I very nearly overlooked these at the thrift store. They should have jumped right out at me, as different as they are from all the modern boxes of ornaments they were stacked with. Thankfully, I looked again and snatched them up as fast as I could! Good thing, because there were treasures inside:

A few of these are plain glass balls, but most of them are really neat! There are even three that I think are made out of spun cotton and are quite old--need to get a close up of those to show you later. The only problem with these is that it looks like someone hung them on the tree and then sprayed the tree with that awful flocking stuff from a can, so several of the ornaments have white yucky stuff on them. I think that if I'm careful I can get it off without damaging them too much.

If you want to really drool, search "Shiny Brite" on eBay and look through just a few of the 1400 listings that come up. Whoa, nelly. I used to think that buying off eBay was cheating, but knowing how hard it has been to find the few ornaments that I do have, mostly one and two at a time, eBay is starting to look a lot more appealing. If I had lots and lots of money, I think I'd be bidding just as fast as my fingers could click the mouse. Chasing the Shiny Brite dragon. Yikes.

This year I have enough of the special ornaments to decorate my tree, and I'm so excited to get everything out and see how it looks! I'm a little nervous about the potentially catastrophic combination of fragile glass ornaments + curious toddler hands but I'm going to risk it. I can always buy more on eBay, right?