The big boom for snow globes came, as it did for so many other things in the 20th century, after a little product placement. In the 1940 Ginger Rogers vehicle Kitty Foyle, young Kitty launches a flashback scene when she shakes a snow globe containing the figure of a girl on a sled. According to Connie Moore and Harry Rinker in Snow Globes: A Collector’s Guide to Selecting, Displaying and Restoring Snow Globes, sales of the keepsakes skyrocketed 200 percent after the film came out. The next year, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane also used a snow globe—containing a little log cabin and made by Perzy’s company—for that monumental opening scene: When publishing titan Charles Kane dies with the word “Rosebud” on his lips, and the snow globe he’s holding drops from his hand and shatters. The 1940s also witnessed the dawning of a new era in advertising ubiquity, and brands began making snow globes to advertise their products. Other popular themes included World War II iconography, such as a soldier at attention.
Most people get location-based snow globes as souvenirs to remember particularly eventful vacations, but apparently some people want mementos of the donut chains they visited. Or at least, that’s the only logic I could come up with for this Dunkin’ Donuts snow globe. The Grumpy Cat snow globe is perfect for anyone who loves memes, anyone that adores Tardar Sauce or anyone who simply hates snow globes. Best of all, it’s not even officially for sale right now, so if you pre-order it, you can claim that you ordered the Grumpy Cat snow globe before it was cool … but it was still awful. Additional details at personalized snow globe.
Snowdomes, snowglobes, paperweights, snow machine, snow shakers, snow scene, water domes, water balls, dream globes, blizzard weights or dream balls were likely derived from heavy glass paper weights which were popular in the latter part of the 1800’s. The glass paperweights were made from costly materials which made the popular item inaccessible to the general public. Not only were snowglobes less expensive, they engaged the viewer. Snow globes are dynamic — creating a miniature snow storm descending on the encased diorama.
Many Americans decorated their trees with imported ornaments up until World War II. Before World War II, many ornaments Americans purchased were imported from Germany. But once World War II started, Corning, an American glass company, started making ornaments out of a light bulb machine. They made 300,000 ornaments a day! The legend behind stockings involves a sweet story about Santa doing something really nice for a poor family. The common legend about Christmas stockings (which has an unknown source and date, according to Smithsonian Magazine) tells a tale of a poor, widowed man who had three young daughters that he worried would never marry due to their lack of wealth. St. Nick overheard people chatting about this family, so he slid down the man’s chimney and placed gold coins in the girls’ clean stockings that were hanging to dry by the fireplace. Source: https://www.qstomize.com/collections/custom-snow-globe.