Exhibition entitled “There is a magical world in a glass ball” opened at the Museum of Ethnography in Mogilev. Recharge yourself with the New Year's atmosphere holidays and you can plunge into childhood until January 16.
The exhibition presents Christmas tree decorations not only from the museum’s funds, but also from private collections, including those of the employees themselves.
- Since all toys from the USSR period, they already have the right to be considered museum exhibits, - researcher says Tatyana Kalacheva. – When visitors 50+ come, they exclaim: “Wow! This is ours childhood!" Someone regretted not keeping the rarities.
The first toys were made of cardboard. These are embossed figures glued together from two halves of convex cardboard. Glass Christmas tree decorations were expensive, Few could afford them. More accessible at the beginning of the 20th century were decorations made of cardboard and paper - in women's magazines on the eve of Christmas even Special instructions and schemes for making such jewelry appeared.
In the USSR, since 1924, as part of anti-religious propaganda, a harsh the fight against the Christmas holiday and the fallen Christmas tree, which since 1929 years were finally banned.
Cotton toys first appeared on Christmas trees at the end of the 19th century century, but their finest hour was the end of the 1930s in the USSR, where it unfolded widespread production of inexpensive and easy-to-make figurines, depicting pioneers, Red Army soldiers, and athletes.
Among the toys are symbols of the era: balls with the image of the Soviet five-pointed stars, hammer and sickle, pioneers and pilots, Kremlin towers and figures revolutions, flying machines, Arctic explorers and a huge number of space-themed jewelry.
The history of the “Baby” Christmas tree decoration set is associated with limited possibilities of space in Khrushchev buildings.
The lights for the Christmas tree look unusual in the shape of a tennis racket with candles on clothespins. For fire safety purposes, place a bucket of sand or water.
During the Great Patriotic War, Christmas tree decorations were often homemade and short-lived, and those that continued to go on sale were made from production waste at various enterprises (for example, from wire at the Moskabel plant). The true blossoming production of Christmas tree decorations in the USSR dates back to the 1950s, and since in the second half of the 1960s, Soviet Christmas tree decorations gradually lost uniqueness, becoming a mass product.
At the exhibition you can see another symbol of the era without gadgets: postcards, who signed by hand.
Elena Kukshinskaya, photo by Andrey Sazonov, SB
