Where the Christmas Toys Come From
Almost all the wooden toys come from Germany, where peasants in the mountains of the Tyrol and Bavaria still make them by hand. A herd-boy on the hillside will see that his cattle are safely feeding in a narrow valley which they cannot leave without passing him, and then he will sit on the grass or on a rock and whittle and whistle or jodel as the soft wood shapes itself in his fingers, through a long summer day. And during the winter, while the snow lies deep on the mountain paths, entire families give their time to making Noah’s arks, toy villages with stiff little green trees, toy furniture, carved figures of all kinds. Anything which a man’s knife can make from poplar or plane wood is carved during the long weeks when outdoor work is impossible. At one time whole German villages used to work in their own homes on cheap wooden toys of all kinds. Nowadays, since the invention of the machines by which the simpler forms are made, most of the toy trades have been swept into the factories of German cities.
Toy reins, such as you see with tinkling sleigh-bells on them, may be woven elsewhere in New England, but it is fairly certain that the bells at least were made in Connecticut, where the industry is a very old one, and where most of the sleigh-bells in the country have been made, as well as cow-bells and the tiny tinkler on the tea-table. And, naturally, the state in which are so many clock factories produces those toys which are made to go by a winding key.
Hundreds of thousands of tin trumpets, and other toy musical instruments which used to be made in France and Germany, are now made in this country, mainly in Pennsylvania and New York. It is fascinating to watch the making of them by machinery. Pull a handle here! Click! down comes a frame and a long sheet of metal is cut into pieces of the exact shape wanted. See! the frame on which the metal rested is a moving belt bringing a fresh sheet of metal under the stamps and at the same time carrying the cut pieces forward over a row of steel cones where a set of clamps like steel jaws catches each separate bit. The clamps close once, nip! open, and each cone pushes forward with a jerk into another which with one motion adds a mouthpiece. What passes on now is a bent tube which needs only a touch of solder to keep it closed, a few rings of paint to make it gay, and perhaps a curved handle, to be a very presentable toy trumpet.
Drums are almost all made in Massachusetts; marbles, the best of them, come from Saxony; the old-fashioned kinds of music-boxes, some of them very elaborate and beautiful, still come from Switzerland. Glass ornaments for Christmas trees are made in Germany; many of the tinsel and cut-paper ornaments also come from Nüremburg and other German cities which are the great toy markets of the world. In one French village near Paris almost all the bone dominoes have been made for years; another section of France turns out nearly all the bone chessmen—such figures as Alice found in the Looking-Glass country; and a quantity of the furry rabbits, silky-haired dogs, and woolly lambs on green-painted bellows which bleat ba-a-a, have been made by one Parisian family for many years. The old proprietor, his sons and daughters and even grandchildren, have lived and worked together at the very top of an old house in one of the side streets of the city, from a time beyond the memory of all but few.
As for dolls—the making of a Christmas doll—that is another story.