Last week’s blog post focused on some winter holiday traditions, including Christmas trees. (If you missed it, you can read it here.) Of course, a lot of the fun in having a tree for Christmas is decorating it with ornaments. However, decorating indoor trees with man-made objects was much slower to catch on than previous traditions, and, like the trees themselves, the first ornaments came from Germany. This week we will meet a fascinating German immigrant who made St. Louis his home and might very well have helped your family to have a brighter Christmas.
Around the middle of the 1800s, a man called Hans Greiner appears to be the first to have profited from what he called “baubles,” glass ornaments that he sold to excited customers. By the end of the 1800s, ornaments were a huge business, generating millions of dollars. “In the 1890s, Woolworth’s department store in the U.S. sold more than $25 million in German-imported ornaments made of lead and hand-blown glass each year.” (https://www.annualornaments.com/blogs/news/the-history-of-christmas-ornaments-todays-favorites#:~:text=Like%20the%20Christmas%20tree%2C%20Christmas,were%20a%20huge%20commercial%20success.)
If you have St. Louis German or Russian roots, you may have heard of an immigrant called Eugene Frohse, who became quite famous for his beautiful handmade sugar ornaments. Eugene, born in Russsia in 1873 to German parents, was the son of a pharmacist who wanted a son who would follow in his father's footsteps. But Eugene had a stutter and didn’t like to work with people, so his father sent him to apprentice to a Russian candy maker south of St. Petersburg. He spent a few years mastering the intricate techniques of Easter egg painting as well as learning to make candy animal cookies to hang on Christmas trees. Having learned from a master, when Eugene was seventeen, he joined his family as they moved to St. Louis.
When the rest of his family decided to go back to Europe, Eugene stayed. He went to work at the Banke Wenneker Candy Company in St. Louis where he eventually became a candy maker. Eugene’s specialty was sugar ornaments made by hand, but he only started selling them at the age of sixty-seven, when family and friends convinced him he could supplement his income that way. Working from his basement in Lemay in St. Louis County, he continued producing sugar ornaments for sale until he was 97 years old! At that time, when he felt he had lost dexterity in his hands, Eugene turned his grass-roots business over to a family member, Darlyne Rasch, who kept making the same high-quality sugar ornaments well into the 1970s. Eugene Frohse died in 1976 at the age of 103.
The ornaments he produced were not meant to be eaten, although they were not toxic. He used sugar, albumen, gelatin, and food color in his later ornaments and cornstarch, marshmallow syrup, and confectioner’s sugar early on. At one point, they added anise to the ornaments to make them smell more festive, but family pets and even children were taking bites off lower branches, so the anise was discontinued.
(Two examples of Frohse's sugar ornaments above. You can learn more about them in this article: “A Yummy German Christmas Tree Tradition Borrowed by Czarist Russia––Collected But Not Eaten Today,” by geschenke2015, posted 19 January 2013, https://dannwoellertthefoodetymologist.wordpress.com/2023/01/19/a-yummy-german-christmas-tree-tradition-borrowed-by-czarist-russia-collected-but-not-eaten-today/)
This unpretentious, talented gentleman created small works of art that many families still value and hang on their Christmas trees each year. Perhaps you also have an artist or crafts person in your family whose story needs telling. Or perhaps you have an immigrant ancestor who has added some small piece to the rich fabric of St. Louis city or county. As families congregate this week and next for the holidays, what better time to capture the biographies of those in your family who deserve to be remembered. And, when you do, please think about contributing those biographies to the StLGS City/County Biographies Project on our website. It’s so easy to write a short essay, and we look forward to your contributions. Everything you need to know about submitting a bio is on our website.
No Blog Next Week . . .
Your blogger and her trusty assistant editor will be celebrating the holidays next week with their families. We'll be back with you again the first week of January when we will send out the January 2024 StLGS schedule so you can mark our upcoming January meetings and classes on your new calendars.
In the meantime, all of us at St. Louis Genealogical Society wish all of you a very happy belated Chanukah, a very Merry Christmas and Kwanzaa, and a happy, healthy New Year!
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