Christmas Rocks epilogue

The journey’s not over until it’s over. I flew to Texas from Philadelphia, which means I would have to go by New Hope on the drive home. Well, I don’t have to go through New Hope, but I’ll use any excuse to visit a Christmas shop, and New Hope is the home of A Christmas Past, one of my favorites. I never know if I’ll come away with a couple of shopping bags full of penguins or just a handful. I’ve even struck out a couple of times, mostly because I’ve already got whichever penguins they have available from a previous trip. I visit A Christmas Past two or three times a year. Even if I leave empty handed, it’s always fun to stop in and it’s a nice way to take a break during a long drive home.  On this particular visit, I found quite a few penguins, including a couple of the duplicates in my collection. More about those repeats tomorrow.

Kurt S. Adler plastic skaters

Acquired: September 28, 2008, A Christmas Past, New Hope, Pa.

Number: 0511 0512 0513

Size: 5 inches tall

Price: $9.95 each

TJ’s Christmas penguins with red knit hats and scarves holding gifts, tree and skis

Acquired: September 28, 2008, A Christmas Past, New Hope, Pa.

Number: 0514 9515 0516

Size: 3.5 inches tall

Price: unknown

Christmas Rocks, part 4: Rock on

Most of the Christmas stores I find are in touristy locations amidst the usual mix of pottery, knitting and fudge shops that make up places like that. That’s not the case with Christmas Rocks in Houston. You really have to know where you’re going to find it on a side street in a residential part of town where some of the houses have been turned into professional offices. After years in practice, two lawyers opened Christmas Rocks as a way to make good use of some extra office space. The law offices moved upstairs and Christmas Rocks moved in downstairs. The inventory is large and varied and it’s fun to browse from one room to the next. I found penguins all over the place and came away with a big haul. I worried a little about how I was going to get the ornaments home safely on my flight back. But as one owner tallied up the ornaments, the other carefully wrapped and boxed each one and fit them snugly in a cardboard box that turned out to be just the right size for the overhead compartment on the plane. I was able to carry the ornaments on board in a shopping bag and all of them made it to the end of the journey intact.

Frosted trio with big orange beaks and feet, and colorful hats and scarves

Acquired: September 27, 2008, Christmas Rocks, Houston

Number: 0502 0503 0504

Size: 4.25 inches tall

Price: $17.50 each

Christmas Rocks, part 3: Play ball

The conference ended in Fort Worth and I still wasn’t sure if I would be allowed back into Houston, but by the time I got there, things were returning to normal. The night curfew was lifted the day I arrived. Some cleanup was still going on downtown. A few sidewalks were taped off where some of the skyscrapers’ windows were broken. I was having some coffee in an atrium of a building near my hotel and looked up to see a worker walking around on the cracked glass ceiling a couple of floors above where I was sitting. I moved. And the Astros’ game with the Atlanta Braves was on for that night. I was finally able to say that I had seen baseball games in all the major league parks. My trip was a success and there was an extra bonus when I discovered a little store called Christmas Rocks.

Clear penguins with red hats, scarves, and bow tie

Acquired: September 27, 2008

Number: 0499 0500 0501

Size: 3.75 to 4 inches tall

Price: $5.95 each

Christmas Rocks, part 2: Warnings

I had booked a flight to and from Houston so I could see a game at Minute Maid Park — my final major league baseball stadium — and I rented a car to drive to and from Fort Worth. A week before my trip, Hurricane Ike hit Texas, and the day before I was supposed to leave trip, I received a message that my hotel reservation had been cancelled. I scrambled to find a new place to stay, not realizing the full consequences of the hurricane’s impact. Houston was without power and a curfew had been imposed. Driving out of the airport in Houston was a little scary. The streets were virtually deserted, with trees down and signs knocked over, one of them punching through the roof of an apartment building. I made it to Fort Worth, but then I began to  see flashing highway signs that warned: Do Not Travel to Houston or Beaumont. I was worried that I might not be able to get back.

Penguin juggling peppermints on a wire

Acquired: September 27, 2010, Christmas Rocks, Houston

Number: 0510

Size: 6.25 inches tall

Price: $5

Christmas Rocks, part 1: Heading out

I went to a conference in Fort Worth, Texas, one year and I decided to combine the trip with a visit to Houston to complete my tour of all the major league baseball stadiums. It also turned out to be one of my biggest Christmas ornament shopping sprees when I found a very cool store called Christmas Rocks in an out-of-the-way neighborhood in Houston. It’s a trip that almost never happened. More tomorrow.

Seasons of Cannon Falls snowball penguin head with red felt hat and collar

Acquired: September 27, 2008, Christmas Rocks, Houston

Number: 0498

Size: 4 inches tall, 2.75 inches diameter

Price: $6.95

International set

These four Santa penguins came from two different places. One you can see is from Montreal and the fantastic Noël Eternel store. The other three I found in Christmas Rocks, another excellent Christmas store, when I was in Houston later the same year. Each of these glass ornaments is unique, but it seems like there are three basic poses. The Montreal penguin and the top penguin are the same style, but you can see small differences in the hat and in the yellow breast feathers. I’m a little worried that the inscription on the Montreal ornament is rubbing off, but at least it will always be here on My Penguin Tree.

Montreal glass penguin with Santa hat

Acquired: April 19, 2008, Noël Eternel, Montreal, PQ

Number: 0460

Size: 3 inches tall

Price: 10.99 $CAN

Three glass penguins with Santa hats

Acquired: Sept. 27, 2008, Christmas Rocks, Houston, Texas

Number: 0505 0506 0507

Size: 3 inches tall

Price: $7.25 each

Shine on

I bought identical penguins 100 ornaments and a little over a year apart, one in New York City and the other in the Poconos near my home. This shows how the penguin ornament collection really started to take off around the same time multiple penguin movies were making their rounds. The pace is more like 150 to 175 a year lately which means I’ll probably have more than 1,000 in a couple of years

I actually have a third ornament that matches these two glass emperor parent and chicks. It’s not as shiny because it’s made of plastic, but when the sun goes down and the lights go on, this penguin outshines almost all the others on the tree. 

It’s a light cover that fits over one bulb on a standard string of Christmas lights. I only bought one, but I don’t remember if it’s because I thought it would be too expensive to buy more or if it was the last one at the store in Houston where I found it. It would be nice to have a whole string full of these.

Two Merck Family Old World Christmas glass emperor penguin and chick ornaments with green glitter trim

Acquired: December 6, 2006, Tabwa, Greenwich Ave., New York City

Number: 0349

Size: 2.75 inches tall

Price: $8.50

Acquired: January 9, 2008, Christmas Factory, Marshall’s Creek, Pa.

Number: 0449

Size: 2.75 inches tall

Price: $7.99

Merck Family Old World Christmas plastic light cover

Acquired: September 27, 2008, Christmas Rocks, Houston 

Number: 0508

Size: 3 inches tall

Price: $7.99

Twice as nice

These two look good enough to eat. So good, in fact, that I bought two of them on separate occasions. I tried to convince myself that the second one was colored differently, but they are identical. The first one came from Williamsburg, Va., where I had made a detour on a driving trip from New Jersey to Florida. It was around Easter and the traffic on I-95 was bumper to bumper from Washington, D.C., to Daytona Beach, Fla., so I decided to stop for the night, and then take a longer slower route south the next day. My intention was to see historic Williamsburg, then head to Kitty Hawk, N.C., to visit the Century of Flight exhibit at the Wright Brothers National Monument. Instead I spent most of the day in three Christmas shops. By the time I got back to I-95, it was late and there were no motel rooms available, so I slept in my car at a rest area in South Carolina along with a lot of other drivers who were in the same predicament. It wasn’t so bad. That night I went to sleep in the driver’s seat with visions of Sugar Plum Penguins dancing in my head.

Sugary glass penguins with candy colored accents

Acquired: 1. April 3, 2004, Bassett’s Christmas Shop, Williamsburg, Va.

2. Sept. 28, 2008, Christmas Rocks, Houston, Texas

Number: 0234 0497

Size: about 2.5 inches tall

Price: $6.50, $5.75 

Painted pewter

The German tradition of painted pewter ornaments has been kept alive at Wilhelm Schneizer Pewter since 1796. The metal is mostly flat in slight bas relief, but it looks fully three dimensional thanks to the detail on the penguin, his star-topped tree, the sled full of Christmas presents tied with wide ribbon bows and the basket of yummy looking fish balanced on top.

It came from Christmas Rocks in Houston, when I was in town to finish off another collection of mine. The Houston Astros were the last stop on my tour of all the Major League Baseball stadiums. My first was in Oakland in the summer of 1978, just a few months before I got my first penguin tree ornaments. There’s more to tell about the trip to Houston, but I left Christmas Rocks with a big box full of neatly packed ornaments, so there will be plenty of opportunities to tell you more.

Wilhelm Schneizer painted pewter ornament, Diessen, Germany

Acquired: Sept. 27, 2008, Christmas Rocks, Houston, Texas

Number: 509

Price: $23

Size: about 2 inches tall, 2.25 inches long