The History of Ceramic Christmas Trees

Ceramic Christmas trees first started showing up in American homes in the 1940s, hand-built one at a time by individual potters and hobbyist artists. Each one was a small, one-off project, often finished with tiny bulb-shaped lights wired to glow from within the branches.

The look really took off in the 1950s, when mold companies began producing reusable ceramic tree molds that let home ceramics studios turn out trees far more efficiently than hand-sculpting from scratch. Atlantic Mold Company is credited with copyrighting one of the earliest widely-used designs, the A-64 tree, in 1958, alongside other mold makers of the era like Nowell's Mold, Holland Mold, and McNees Mold.

The timing lined up with a boom in home ceramics as a hobby: with more households running their own kiln and pouring their own molds, ceramic Christmas trees became a fixture of mid-century holiday decor, peaking in popularity through the 1970s before falling out of fashion in the 1980s.

That's the tradition we're keeping alive here at Kerr Farm's Ceramics — every tree Judy makes is still poured in real ceramic molds, then hand-painted, glazed, and fired herself, the same slow process those original mid-century tree makers used.