German ornaments, one of my loves.

My favorite website for purchasing (and perusing) German ornaments is http://shop2.mailordercentral.com/decorationwarehouse/.
I love the variety of German ornaments it carries. The ornament selection is down quite a bit because, I'm guessing, it is just after Christmas but this website seems to (normally) have the best selection and the best prices. (One disclaimer--German ornaments are not inexpensive

even when the prices are "good," so "best prices" is a relative description.) My favorite categories of German ornaments are:

the painted wooden ornaments (an example is pictured, above),

the pewter ornaments (as pictured, below),

the plain or natural wooden ornaments (see the link at the end of this post)

and wax ornaments (more about those later),

and probably in that order.

It is not enough that an ornament is wooden or that it looks German--it needs to come from Germany. When I first met my friends who got me hooked on German ornaments (back in about 1982 and prior to my mission to Germany), they had this attitude and I thought secretly that they were German ornament snobs (just what you're likely thinking of me right now). However, I have joined them in this way of thinking. That is not to say that I do not own non-German, wooden, look-alike ornaments but . . . well, what can I say, the "German" ornaments I love need to be German. Period. I DO like MANY, MANY different ornaments that aren't German. For example, I do not need "German" glass ornaments. I do not need the other billion ornaments I own to come from Germany. I also like ornaments from other countries and in other categories and styles. But for these particular types of ornaments that I named above, excepting the wax ornaments, they need to be true German ornaments. Whew. I've gotten that off my chest now!

It is a different website that has the selection of what I call plain (by that I mean unpainted or natural) wooden ornaments. This is the link for that site generally (I could not successfully "borrow" pictures from that site): http://www.christkindl-markt.com/index.php?osCsid=5edc6c87fd26ecbb9612b540b33ad377
I will discuss wax ornaments on another post because that is another story.

P.S. Perhaps I will even successfully obtain photos of the natural wooden ornaments--even if I have to take pictures myself. They could not be copied from that website as jpegs and so they pasted "blank" to the blog. I must continue my technological quest so that I can do better blogging. Additionally, I really MUST remember to download ALL THE PICTURES in the ORDER I want them and THEN add the text and not have second thoughts when I'm about done adding text to add photos here and there--it does not work! Arrgh.