Woman’s Day visited Rostovites and found out what toys they used to decorate the Christmas tree. Some examples are a real rarity!
Zoya, 38 years old:
– We still have old toys, but there are not so many of them. The paint has peeled off on them, but they are still beloved – from childhood (and not only mine, but also my mother’s). I really love toys on clothespins. We had five identical bespectacled people (late 50s – early 60s of the last century). I really liked them, and I loved to place them on the tree. Then one crashed, I was very upset. And after a while my mother married my stepfather. They began to live together, and he brought his Christmas decorations. When we carried out the “inventory”, my happiness knew no bounds – we had as many as 12 bespectacled people, so beloved by me! And I also can’t imagine a Christmas tree without old glass beads. I even specifically looked for where to buy.
Daria, 27 years old:
– New Year is my favorite holiday, I like all these New Year’s preparations, and especially I love buying Christmas decorations. You know, there is such a sign that you need to hang one new decoration on the tree every time so that the coming year will bring a lot of happiness. Balls, animals, cartoon characters, beads, tinsel and more – your eyes run wild! Everything around is beautiful and shiny. Although there was no such thing before – the tree did not seem less fabulous from this, therefore, despite my love for new toys, I cannot imagine the New Year without old decorations – they have so much warmth and memories. When I was little, I loved to act out scenes with these glass figures, right on the tree. Now I save them like the apple of my eye, God forbid they break! There are a lot of Christmas decorations nowadays, and you can buy them in every store, but there will be no more such as these.
Svetlana, 55 years old:
– This year, Cipollino and the cosmonaut at the Christmas tree celebrate their anniversary – in 2016 they turned 55, like me, by the way. Probably because it seems to me that they have always been. As a child, my sister and I loved to look for toys on the Christmas tree, well, at first we hung them up, and then we thought to each other, for example: “Find me a hare” and so on, who will find it faster. Later my children played this game. Previously, there were more toys of those times – due to two long-distance travels, few survived, but we cherish them as a memory. In general, there is some special attraction in old Christmas tree decorations, because they remember the first release of KVN on a black-and-white screen, Gagarin’s flight into space, and in general, they saw me little. I will never stop loving to decorate the Christmas tree!
Larisa, 42 years old:
– We still keep these toys in our house in memory of the place where the youthful period of my husband Mikhail’s life passed. These were the 70s, he and his family lived in Kazakhstan. Once, a few days before the New Year, 16-year-old Misha and his parents went shopping, and in a department store, in a shop window, they liked a figurine of a Kazakh girl in a yellow dress with a red shoulder blade.
Then we looked at the rest of the toys, and then I wanted to buy one after another: a fish with a red comb, Santa Claus with a long beard, a house in the form of a mushroom, a hare, a pine cone. Many years later, after moving to Rostov, it turned out that some of the Christmas tree decorations remained intact. We thought: since they are in our family, then let them hang on the tree and please the eye. Now the hand does not rise to throw away this piece of family history.
Andrey, 20 years:
– Soviet toys came to our house by inheritance. My grandparents bought them back in the 60s. From generation to generation they passed them on to my parents, and so they still remain in our family. I remember how in my childhood, on New Year’s Eve, I took out a full box and decorate it as soon as possible, and now, out of habit, I hang them on the Christmas tree every year. It’s just that they are special, not like everyone else’s, the images of animals themselves, different figures look truly fabulous and kind. This is probably why I like these toys much more than those that are released today.
Yuzefa Alexandrovna, 78 years old:
– I was born in December 1938 and my mother then bought Christmas tree decorations, and a year later she was gone. I keep toys all my life, but I haven’t put a big Christmas tree for a long time – I have a cat that loves to gnaw everything (laughs). Of course, not all toys have survived. There was a war, an occupation. Once a wing of a German plane got into our house, we ourselves miraculously survived. Many events have happened over the years … Actually, I remember how my aunts in the 40s, on New Year’s Eve, cut down a dry tree (they never destroyed living trees), brought it home and dressed it up. It was a holiday. How were toys made in those years? Manually. The wire frame was wrapped with cotton wool, covered with gauze or paper on top, and then painted. I must say that they looked natural. I had a Christmas tree toy – a sausage, and I tried to bite it very little, it seemed to me that it could be a real sausage …
Toys of Yuzefa Aleksandrovna and other townspeople can be seen at the exhibition in the library named after Pushkin in Novocherkassk from 9 to 19 January.
- Photo Shoot:
- archive of the library to them. Pushkin
Alina Belenkaya, Ekaterina Rakitskaya