An Interview with Connie Porcher

Dateline: December 2000

Connie Porcher, Christmas collector, teacher, historian, and web master, started another new adventure in life in 1999. October 1999 was the debut of Celebrate 365 a quarterly mailed magazine for Christmas collectors. Recently I had the chance to chat with Connie and find out more about her collections and the motivations for taking on the arduous task of producing a newsletter.

Connie, Can you tell me a little about your background?
I am a career teacher and my certification is in Spanish and history. I taught high school Spanish for a number of year, but have my masters in history. I've been involved with a lot of local historical research and projects, including working with the National Registry.

And you've been a Christmas collector for a long time?
We have always done a lot of decorating at Christmas and have a long time collection of antique Christmas ornaments because we live with antiques in our home. The antique ornaments started almost like a hand-me-down collection, as elderly relatives would pass them down. Of course we were very grateful and it became the core which we built on.

How did you become involved with the new ornaments?
When the Radko ornaments first hit the scene, we found one shop in Dayton that carried them only during the holiday season. We would go for a visit and Christmas shopping, but we limit ourselves to one ornament a year. -- because they were so expensive. We collected Radko fairly early, but not extensively by any means.

Then while we were vacationing in Boston in 1996 and happened upon the Christmas Dove Shop. Our first two big purchases were Checkered Past and Tuxedo Carousel. We wound up having packages shipped home from Boston. After we got home we began a search in our area and finally found a huge shop in our area (Bellfair) and also Christmas Village in Columbus -- The Rest is History!

What made you decide to start Glass Links -- the email list for glass collectors?
I was visiting the Dave Williams web site, as it was the only one around at the time. They have a chat area and a Q & A area also. Someone would post about finding an ornament or someone would have an ad on the site. Terrie Armentrout and I started Radko Links mainly as a way to manage our web site books marks. About a month later the mailing list started with about twelve people. We are now up to 470 on the list.

Tell us how you decorate for the Holidays?
At Christmas time this year I am doing even more than last year. We have a seven foot antique feather tree with antique ornaments. We do more with the paper and cotton batting antique ornaments rather than the antique glass on this tree. We use tinsel, paper cornucopias, old Christmas stockings, and chromolithographed ornaments along with Blumchen pieces.

A six foot ivory feather tree holds the Patricia Breen ornaments.

I'm just finishing up my Radko tree, it's 7.5' and it is on an EZ rotating stand. Normally I do a lot of non-glass items on the tree, but this year I decided to do all glass with 99 of it Radko ornaments.

What appeals to you from the different lines you come across while writing newsletter articles and on Internet?

• I love the vintage pieces from Radko designs as you know by now, my tastes run to rather traditional ornaments.
• Patricia Breen -- I like the refinement of them, especially the traditional Santas with micro glittering..
• MIA art pieces -- I will be doing a display in the local museum with my MIA art pieces. It is interesting to see how artists emulate the masters. As a glass artist, MIA takes a masterpiece and puts her own spin on it. They are miniature pieces of art.
• Slavic Treasures just has a spectacular collectors club ornament. It's all neatly tied together with such attention to detail. Slavic Treasures, then the club becomes the Treasures Hunters Club. The box that it comes in, as well as the collector's ornament are all tied together thematically. It shows a lot of planning and creativity.

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