The business began with a grandmother’s tree.

Old World Christmas is a Spokane company, and its story starts with a shop rather than a factory. A December 1994 profile by Paul Turner of the Spokesman-Review, reprinted in The Seattle Times, says that when Beth Merck married Tim Merck in 1977, he owned an antiques store in Spokane. Business there was good, the article says, except in the Christmas shopping season, when customers seemed more interested in other kinds of gifts.

The answer came from Beth Merck’s own childhood. The 1994 profile says she remembered the heirloom imported ornaments her grandmother had hung on Christmas trees, and thought others might love them as she did. The couple, who both spoke German, travelled to Germany to look for a source of collectible-quality tree decorations. According to the article, they connected with a family-operated glass-making business that had access to stacks of old ornament moulds, and placed a large order. Back in Spokane months later, the ornaments sold well.

Both a 2014 press release from the company’s current owner and a 2024 profile published by the utility Avista give 1979 as the year Old World Christmas was founded, and the Avista piece names Tim and Beth Merck as its founders. The Spokesman-Review profile says the couple decided in the early 1980s to make the ornament business their full-time work, and quotes Tim Merck saying the first year was a lean one. The same article describes Tim Merck working to set up the supplier relationships behind the company, including trips into East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Original designs, made with German glassworkers.

Beth Merck became the designer. The 1994 profile says she began by choosing the colour schemes for the ornaments the couple imported and eventually moved on to creating original designs. It describes her as an artist with a fine arts degree from Eastern Washington University, working from a studio space in the company’s warehouse complex on East Main in Spokane, and says fans of the “E.M. Merck Collection” of glass ornaments and wooden nutcracker figures queued for her autograph at giftware trade shows.

She summed up her approach to the newspaper as “originality based on tradition”, and said she tried to picture decorations that would appeal to children and families. At the time of the profile, the article says, her glass ornaments were still produced in Germany, and she spoke warmly about the German craftsmen who carried out her plans. The range by then also included nutcrackers and light covers alongside the glass.

Later descriptions of the line stay close to that mix. Gladstone Investment’s October 2014 release describes Old World Christmas as a designer and distributor of blown glass Christmas ornaments, table top figurines, vintage-style light covers and nostalgic greeting cards, sold into the independent gift channel; its December 2020 release calls the company a provider of figural glass Christmas ornaments. The 2024 Avista profile describes the ornaments as glass-blown and hand-painted.

The same Avista profile describes how new designs can begin with the public. It says customers can send in ideas for an ornament through the company’s website or customer service line, and that the company votes on the suggestions in early February before starting work on the ones it chooses. It also tells the story of the company’s pickle ornaments, linked in the article to a German tradition of hiding a pickle in the Christmas tree, where whoever finds it is said to have good luck.

Design and documentation.

Christmas decor and ornament brands occupy an unusual corner of the home trade. Their products are bought for a few weeks of the year but kept for many more, unpacked from the same boxes each December and often handed down within a family, so a name in this field is asked to stand for continuity as much as for novelty.

Much of the category leans on borrowed tradition: mouth-blown glass, carved figures, village scenes and old-fashioned lettering that point back to older European workshop traditions. Behind that look, the companies themselves may be family firms, importers, designers who work with makers elsewhere, or businesses that have changed owners several times, and the place a brand calls home is not always the place its pieces are made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what a company says about itself — who founded it and where, who owns it now, where its pieces are produced and how its packaging and marks have looked over time — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Founded by the Mercks, owned by Gladstone Investment since 2014.

The founders ran the business until 2014. The 2024 Avista profile says Tim and Beth Merck led Old World Christmas from its founding and sold the business in 2014. Gladstone Investment Corporation, a publicly traded business development company based in McLean, Virginia, announced on 21 October 2014 that on 14 October 2014 it had acquired the assets of O.W.A., Inc., which traded as Old World Christmas. The release says Gladstone was joined in the deal by members of the company’s management team, and that it was partnering with a new chief executive, industry executive Doug Lauer.

Gladstone Investment has owned the company since then. In December 2020 it announced a recapitalisation of its investment in what it called Old World Christmas, Inc., and that release named Neal Applefeld as chief executive and Christine Erickson as chief operating officer and chief financial officer. Gladstone’s own portfolio pages, read in October 2026, still list Old World Christmas among its current investments, with its headquarters in Spokane, Washington.

The company has stayed on the same Spokane street where the 1994 profile found it. The Avista profile says Old World Christmas runs its operation from a warehouse on East Main Avenue that houses its offices, its warehouse and a seasonal outlet store, which the article says opens from mid-October to 23 December. It adds that the ornaments are sold through the company’s website, through Amazon and in that Spokane shop, as well as through retailers.

For a design guide, Old World Christmas shows how a brand can be built on an inherited look rather than a new one, with a designer’s name, a family story and old German glassmaking traditions doing the work a logo might do elsewhere. Compare another name in glass ornaments in our Christopher Radko brand guidelines and a seasonal home brand in our Yankee Candle brand guidelines. For this guide we use fir green, gilt gold and glass red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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