Cats custom snow globes

Four major companies in America continued to produce snow globes of varying quality and subject including souvenirs, but also holiday globes and novelty gifts. It was a similar landscape in Europe, with a few manufacturers dominating the snow globe scene. By the 1980s, snow globes were still a staple of the gift industry, but they’d also become the epitome of kitsch—probably because everyone and everything from Disney’s Bambi to the Lone Ranger to Niagara Falls and the White House could be put under glass and forced to endure frequent and bewildering snowstorms. But what does the market look like today? Oddly enough, snow globes remain big business. There is a sizable collector’s market for both antique and novelty domes. And Erwin Perzy III’s company is still healthy. The Vienna shop produces upwards of 200,000 snow globes a year, and that’s just a small part of the market. It’s perhaps a mark of how familiar a form a snow globe is, and what innocent—almost saccharine—kitsch they’re meant to be that they can be so gleefully perverted, as this collection of weird, macabre, and wonderful snow globes demonstrates.

Etsy seller TheTwistedTiara managed to combine the classic beauty and grace you find in ordinary snow globes with a ghost story to create a ballerina dancing near a grave while holding her own bloody head in her hand. By far the most delightfully gory snow globe in existence is this wonderful Halloween promotional product that shows Michael Myers attacking a teenage girl in a swirl of floating blood-colored sprinkles. If you really want a snow globe that will get people talking, this is it. Additional info at personalised snow globe.

Anatomy of a Snow Globe: Originally the globes were made of glass and the figures inside were made of porcelain, bone, metals, minerals, rubber or wax. The snow or “flitter” as it’s called, could have been ground rice, wax, soap, sand, bone fragments, meerschaum, metal flakes or sawdust. Producers tried everything. The base was either round or square and may have been of stone, marble, ceramic or wood. Today, all but the best quality globes are plastic. The liquid is just water in the plastic snow globes. Glass snow globes often include glycol, an antifreeze, to keep the glass from breaking if frozen. A little dust doesn’t bother snow globes – but they don’t like direct sunlight.

American G.I.s stationed in West Germany after the World War II helped turn nutcrackers into Christmas decorations. Arlene Wagner, a curator at Leavenworth Nutcracker Museum in Washington, told Slate that soldiers remaining in Germany after the war sent back the dolls to America as Christmas gifts. Later on, American soldiers would help keep the German nutcracker business afloat as East German manufacturers would export their nutcrackers to West Germany knowing that American soldiers would scoop them up. Source: https://www.qstomize.com/collections/custom-snow-globe.