As every year, the editorial staff of
20 Minutes
accompanies you during the December holidays.
And like every year, we run after the essentials of the table and the decoration.
In 2022, we reveal a little more about the kings of the fiesta.
From December 23 to 25, find the underside of the “Hotte Stuffs”, these Christmas or New Year stars.
In other words, the tree, the Christmas ball, the wrapping paper, the log and, finally, the iconic orange.
All illustrated by our journalist, queen of pencils, Diane Regny.
In this second episode, the Christmas ball speaks.
A timeless work of art, the fruit of the ancestral know-how of glassblowers, it remains "the queen of the tree" and many lovers of tradition do not hesitate to spend substantial sums to increase their collection, year after year.
I am an apple.
Or rather, I was an apple.
But I haven't been edible for a long time.
I appeared in my current form in the middle of the 19th century, but it is not clear where, Germany and Lorraine disputing my paternity.
But basically, my nationality doesn't matter, because what is indisputable is that I am the work of glass artisans.
Since then I have taken other forms, I have been molded in other materials, such as plastic, papier-mâché, or even porcelain.
If the toys are distributed by the thousands in the song of Tino Rossi, me, I am sold by the millions.
According to a November 2019 Yougov survey, 41% of French people add elements to their Christmas decoration every year and 8% renew it completely.
And do not imagine that because it is the crisis, I am not sacrificed on the altar of savings.
Christmas is sacred and the budget that the French devote to my purchase has even increased by 2 euros compared to last year.
Classic, timeless, iconic
Among all the decorations available on the market, which one do customers prefer?
Me !
I am “the star of the Christmas tree”, confirms Marie-Claire Gollentz, director of Féérie de Noël in Riquewihr (Alsace), the only store in France 100% dedicated to Christmas open all year round.
In this shop, “the crowds begin in July and August and only get stronger until the end of the year”, welcoming up to 3,000 customers a day during Advent.
“It's the classic round shape in red-coloured glass that sells the best,” says Marie-Claire Gollentz.
And yet, customers have the choice, among the 26,000 references of the store.
But what do you want, the classic is timeless.
Iconic, even.
Admittedly, my plastic and cheap Chinese cousins delight small budgets and parents of young children whose indelicate hands approach a little too close to the tree.
But for true lovers of Christmas and its traditions, glass, if not unbreakable, is irreplaceable.
They represent everything we celebrate at Christmas: light and life in the heart of the night, the hope of seeing spring again.
And for that, my best ambassador is undoubtedly Didier Oeuvray.
This Swiss, owner of the Oethel et Cie flea market in Porrentruy, has been collecting me for about forty years and today owns thousands of them like me, the oldest of which date from the 1880s. some charm.
Their reflections are incomparable, weathered by time.
They represent everything we celebrate at Christmas: light and life in the heart of the night, the hope of seeing spring again.
»
A unique know-how
I owe my brilliance to the ancestral gestures of glassblowers.
In Lorraine, the Center International d'art verrier de Meisenthal revived this know-how almost thirty years after the factory closed in 1969. Heated to more than 1,000 degrees in an oven, the molten glass is blown by cane by expert mouths.
It makes me thicker, and therefore stronger, than when I'm shaped out of spun glass, which is glass heated with a torch flame, then worked and blown through a glass tube.
My shimmering reflections come from the layer of silvering on my inner face.
As for my external face, it is painted, or not.
Since 1998, therefore, I find my colors of yesteryear in the Northern Vosges, to the delight of customers, who robbed the 70,000 pieces produced last year, including 3,500 copies of their annual creation, sold 24 euros room.
At Féérie de Noël, my dearest friends “are worth around fifteen euros”, explains Marie-Claire Gollentz.
The vast majority of references come from Eastern Europe, as does a good part of Didier Oeuvray's collection.
Because it is actually there that I am mainly produced, and in particular in Czechoslovakia.
A know-how so unique, that even “during the Cold War, the country, although under Soviet domination, continued to export its decorations to the United States, says Didier Oeuvray.
We were just hiding where it came from.
»
Our Christmas file
A precious object that is proudly displayed one month in the year, I must be hung with care so as not to slip when the branches of your tree begin to dry and tilt downwards.
And for that, Marie-Claire Gollentz has a tip: "You need a string that's not too long.
Pass the branch through the string, twist the top of the string and wrap it around the branch.
Because finding myself shattered into a thousand pieces is really the (Christmas) balls.
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