How a Small Town Saved Christmas in America

Downtown Wellsboro, Pa., decorated for the season. SGB Designs/Shutterstock

I’ll never forget the night I discovered “the town that saved Christmas.”

I had signed up for a bus trip out of Tioga County, Pennsylvania, to Kentucky. I had never been to either place before, nor had I ever taken a trip on a tour bus. As we left the rolling hills of the Allegheny Plateau, I realized everyone on the bus was local—from a region called the Pennsylvania Wilds (aka PA Wilds). I perceived this was the case when someone spoke up and said, “Always strange leaving the hills, isn’t it?” Passengers gazed lovingly out their windows at the passing hills and quipped “sure is” and “so true,” followed by a collective sigh.

After we returned from our trip, I decided to explore the area whose inhabitants felt such a strong connection to their land. That’s how I first stumbled into a town called Wellsboro, Pennyslvania.

On the corner of East Avenue and Main Street, a painted sign on the side of a building urges travelers to visit “The Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania.” I was hooked and stayed to explore. Farther down the street, a lush green park was the setting for an awe-inspiring water fountain depicting Wynken, Blynken, and Nod from the famous children’s poem of the same name. It would have been worth driving hours just to see that magnificent sculpture itself.

As I walked on, I was astonished to find that the main street had a wide grass median complete with authentic, working, gas street lamps. An impeccably preserved 19th-century downtown created the effect of a postcard from a bygone era. I wondered what kind of wayback machine I had stepped out of.

As night fell, I wandered into the Penn Wells Hotel, where they’ve been welcoming guests for the past 150 years. I was immediately intrigued by a large American flag on the lobby wall; I had never seen anything like it. It seemed to be made of shiny red, white, and blue Christmas ornaments.

I approached the clerk at the counter, who looked—unintentionally or maybe on purpose—like a kindly older gentleman from another century.

“Excuse me,” I said, “I was wondering if there is some sort of story behind that flag over there.”

He looked over his glasses with a smile on his face and said, “Oh, don’t you know anything about Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, the Shiny Brites, and the town that saved Christmas?”

Although it was summer, I felt as though I was a character in a classic Christmas story, standing in the midst of swirling snow as the images of Christmas long, long ago began to take shape.

The story began in the enchanted Thuringian Forest in Germany, in a small village named Lauscha, where, in 1597, two master glassmakers and their families opened their first factory. By the mid-19th century, they were making handblown glass ornaments for Christmas. But Lauscha glassblowers couldn’t sell their wares directly to the public. They had to go through trading houses in Sonneberg, a town 12 miles away that was famous for its production of wooden toys and beautiful dolls.

For the glassblowers to fulfill their orders, every member of the family was required to work—sometimes 15 hours per day for two or three weeks straight. For this and other reasons, they began to circumvent the trading houses by inviting registered dealers to their home factories. These dealers represented larger retailers: Enter American entrepreneur F.W. Woolworth.

The year 1880 was a lucky one for the gifted glassblowers of Lauscha. That was when the man who pioneered merchandising and direct purchasing visited Lauscha to see what all the fuss was about. Impressed with what he saw, F.W. Woolworth placed a small order for glass ornaments to be sold at his store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The new Christmas novelties, selling individually at flat prices, sold out quickly.

Woolworth’s put Lauscha on the map and was their biggest buyer for decades. Others, such as Sears, Roebuck and Co. and S.S. Kresge & Co., eventually jumped on the Lauscha bandwagon. Americans’ insatiable appetite for German glass ornaments spread—and the way the world decorated for Christmas was forever changed.

By September 1939, however, Adolph Hitler’s invasion of Poland and a British blockade ended the United States’ import of German ornaments. A German immigrant and ornament importer based in New York City, Max Eckardt, saw a crisis coming. Most U.S. Christmas ornaments came from Germany, and, with no glass ornaments and much less electric lighting than we have today, the upcoming Christmas looked dark and gloomy.

Eckardt, along with Woolworth’s representative Bill Thompson, approached Corning Glass Works in New York’s Southern Tier region about the possibility of mass-producing ornaments in time for Christmas. Corning’s long innovative history already included the development of a bulb-shaped encasement for Thomas Edison’s incandescent lamp, among other pioneering feats.

Corning began experimenting with the creation of glass “blanks” created with the same machines that made light bulbs. Molds cupping hot glass traveled along a conveyor belt, a puff of air created its hollow shape, and a silver coat on the inside made it shine. The experiment was a success, but now they had to put their Wellsboro plant to the test to see whether they could retrofit their glass bulb operations in time for Christmas.

Five hundred employees were added, and Wellsboro delivered a miracle. Using Corning’s own high-speed ribbon machine developed by Wellsboro plant manager Billy Woods, millions of Christmas ornaments were churned out in time to brighten Christmas 1939. For many, the next few years would never be as bright again.

A box of Shiny Brite ornaments.

When war inevitably came to involve the United States, a shortage of metal led to the creation of cardboard tops for the bulbs, and a ban on silver nitrate inspired the use of tinsel inside the bulbs to maintain their signature shine. Most importantly, at a time when Americans needed to hear it most, Shiny Brite Christmas boxes were labeled “American Made” beneath a picture of Santa Claus shaking hands with Uncle Sam.

In 1946, the Wellsboro division of Corning Glass Works created an American flag out of Shiny Brite Christmas bulbs to honor their returning World War II veterans. It was photographed for Life magazine and now sits on permanent display at the Penn Wells Hotel.

Shiny Brite bulbs continued to be the most popular Christmas tree ornaments throughout the 1940s and 1950s, and many of us still have them today—carefully passed down to us by loved ones with happy memories of Christmases past.

The hotel clerk had told me a story for the ages, a story of when America made her own goods and people worked together for a country they were proud of.

“Wow,” I said breathlessly. “I had no idea.”

The Dickens of a Christmas Celebration takes place annually in Wellsboro, Pa. Courtesy of Wellsboro Chamber of Commerce

Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, keeps its history alive with its annual “Dickens of a Christmas Celebration,” and nearly every shop window is adorned with Shiny Brites. Its residents passionately tell their story to any traveler who passes through because it truly is “the town that saved Christmas.”