I will be honest, I am a bit of a Christmas grinch. I know a lot of people are. However, with age, comes perspective, and as I look back on past holidays, what always comes to the front of my mind is how hard my parents worked to make the holidays happen--my mom providing the labor, direction, and buoyant love of the holiday ritual, and my dad providing the bon-homme and slightly buzzed Irish excitement necessary for the whole endeavor not to derail.
My mom comes from a long line of Christmas lovers--Swiss on one side and English on the other. The result of blended traditions in my family was a Franco-Germanic-Anglo- Irish explosion of carved Santa nutcrackers with fluffy beards and twinkling lights precisely strung through Spode dishes on the mantle. Every year, our home was transformed for a month. It was always more or less the same layout and placements, and every year it was thoroughly packed up and organized.
The holidays were a lot of work for my mom, in addition to working full time as a teacher she was exhausted at the end of the day. If I ever needed to find her at night--and she was not busy preparing something for her Christmas party or a friend’s in the kitchen (or watching a Hallmark movie)--she would be sitting in a recliner in the room with the Christmas tree. She would have the overhead lights off, and the room would be lit by the lights on the tree. She was never really doing anything aside from staring peacefully at the tree. The tree was a totem, a shrine to her ancestors and their traditions. Every year, new ornaments appeared from the aether to commemorate a new hobby or milestone for my sister and I.
These Cloudware ornaments are our contribution to you and your family’s traditions, whatever they may be. I was inspired by some of our oldest family heirloom ornaments--the paper thin, mirrored glass spheres my mom unpacked from their musty paper every year, some still in the boxes they came in when her grandmother got them. They were these points of Platonic perfection on a tree run wild with squirrels fishing, Charlie Brown dancing, and dinosaurs ice skating, all bought from Hallmark. I hope these ornaments make your great great grandchildren happy, and intrigued about where they came from, and the way they look like little planets or the sky captured in a ball.
-Mark Warren, Creative Director and Co-Founder
