Help me find this Christmas decoration!
October 18, 2013 6:56 AM   Subscribe

I found a 9" painted clay/ceramic bird Christmas statue at thrift store in the Milwaukee area, and it's so fantastic that I another one. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find anything on Google so far. Can you help me out?

Here's some pictures of it. It's about 9" tall and is made out of some sort of ceramic. It's hard to see in the picture, but the hat on the head of the bird has a little bell at the end on top of the statue (it's the little bump in the first picture past the large snowflake, sort of in the middle of the bird's back).

I've tried search Google, eBay, and Amazon for all combinations of "fat/large/big Christmas/Santa bird statue/decoration" but haven't been able to turn anything up. At a minimum I'm hoping to find some more copies of this exact bird, but would be really excited if this was part of some sort of collection, Christmas or otherwise.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug to Grab Bag (6 answers total)
 
That looks like paper mache.

Here are some similar ones, about half the size.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 7:01 AM on October 18, 2013


Response by poster: It's definitely not paper mache.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 7:02 AM on October 18, 2013


Well, the snowflake pattern was applied well (maybe as a adhesive/by machine?), but the hand painting around the beak and hat is messy, which would point to a discount retailer of some kind, probably made in China (I assume you've already checked the bottom for any information you could find.)

Maybe someplace like alibaba.com might carry it still; it could also have been discontinued, in which case haunting eBay or thrift stores is your best bet.

The only other thing I can think of is that it might be one of those paint-your-own ceramic bisque molds, but the snowflakes make that seem less likely.
posted by emjaybee at 7:14 AM on October 18, 2013


Is this a reasonable match?

To me, your bird kind of looks like it might be from one of those pre-cast ceramics classes, where a studio will cast a bunch of a shape from a mould and then students will paint their own, like the classic ceramic Christmas tree. That might account for the messy paint job and the fact that it looks pretty homemade. However, one can usually find copies of those moulds on Ebay and I can't seem to locate one.
posted by urbanlenny at 8:15 AM on October 18, 2013 [1 favorite]


A lot of Christmas ornaments are distributed by Midwest importers. You could contact them to see if they have information. They're wholesalers; they don't sell directly to customers.
posted by theora55 at 8:17 AM on October 18, 2013


Looks like it was made from a gourd.
posted by Ideefixe at 8:26 AM on October 18, 2013


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