Christmas Decorators: Part I

It’s that time of year, and the topic of Christmas Decorators is making the rounds again. Since I had a small part in contributing to this most famous of all Breyer Legends, it’s probably a good time for me to give you the full story, summarize all that I know, and give all of you my thoughts on the matter.

Several years ago - I cannot remember the exact date, or the name of the person in question - I was having an extended phone conversation with a hobbyist. Since I am telephone-phobic, picking up the phone to call a near-total stranger would cause me all manner of trauma. So all I can say for sure is that she probably called me about something on a sales list that had been published somewhere. (Once I’m on the phone, I’m okay: it’s the picking up and/or dialing that gives me the dry heaves.)

Since this was well before the Internet, we were all a little lonelier and desperate for model horse talk, and the conversation quickly drifted from whatever model or models we were discussing to other topics of a model horse nature. (This wasn’t the first, or last of those kind of calls, either. We’ve all had our share of them, haven’t we?)

I mentioned something about collecting Breyer reference material, and the hobbyist on the other end of the line mentioned how she ran across a stash of old mail-order catalogs at a garage sale. She had spent some time going through them, looking for Breyers. She said that she saw "Red and Green Smoke" Breyers in one, specifically mentioning the Running Mare.

It wasn’t anything I had seen or heard about before, so I pestered her for more details - the date, the store, anything - but she couldn’t remember any of that. I made a mental note about them, and that was that.

Our knowledge of Breyer History back then was very rudimentary, compared to today. You could ask Breyer, but then as now, they didn’t know much at all. Getting an answer from Marney Walerius was not always an easy or simple task, either. While she was certainly privy to information we can only dream of now, she was not the clearest of writers or thinkers. (Sometimes she’d ramble, and casually drop a detail or bit of information on us in passing that’d have us scratching our heads…)

I don’t recall ever mentioning or asking about Christmas Decorators to either Breyer or Marney; it probably never even occurred to me to ask. I don’t recall there being any discussion about Christmas-themed Decorators back then. If there had been any discussion about them in the newsletters of the time, I had completely missed it. That phone conversation was the first I heard of any Green or Red Breyers even existing; we may or may not have even called them "Christmas Decorators," though we probably made the assumption (Holiday mail-order catalogs + Decorators = Christmas Decorators!)

The facts that no one actually had one or knew much about them were not impediments to belief, though. There were a lot of models that only existed in rumor: they only stopped being a rumor once one showed up - and that happened a lot back then. There were models that existed on paper that didn’t seem to exist, and models that existed that we had no documentation for.

The safest bet was to assume that they were possibly, or even probably real, and hope you’d be the lucky one to be there when one finally shows up.

And for several years, that was pretty much the story.

I didn’t think much about those models until several years later, when I found Nancy Young’s account of Gale Good’s story in Breyer Molds & Models. I had not heard of Gale’s story before. All I could think was that, at last, there was more evidence!

Or was there? More on that, next.

Urban Legend: The Palomino Old Mold Mare

Here’s the first installment of something I hope becomes a semi-regular feature: Breyer Urban Legends!

There’s always been a lot of information of dubious quality circulating in the world of Breyer model horse history. This is due to a lack of existing documentation, the sometimes less-than-stellar quality of material published (especially online), and the utter hugeness of the topic (hundreds of models, some in dozens of colors, and some of those colors with multiple variations and releases!)

In the absence of reliable or consistent information, legends grow. And boy, there are a lot of them. I wince at some of the want lists I see published on MH$P, full of models that are little more than artifacts of bad research, rumor and wishful thinking. Perhaps this Urban Legend feature will help some of you cross off a few unattainable things from those want lists.

I won’t even try to cover the ones I don’t have any reliable information on; where I have an opinion stand in for a fact (usually in order to make a plausible argument or deduction,) I’ll try to make that clear, too.

Since we were all abuzz about the Old Mold Mare this week, the topic of my first Breyer Urban Legend seemed pretty obvious: the Gloss Palomino Old Mold Mare!

The original Old Mold Mare and Foal were made in four colors. In ascending order of rarity, they would be Alabaster, Bay, Gray Appaloosa and Woodgrain. (Alabasters are relatively easy to find; Woodgrains, not so much.)

It was assumed, back in the dark days of Breyer History research, that the Old Mold Mare and Foal came in the same assortment of colors that the Family Arabian Mare and Foal did. They were, after all, their replacements, right? Marney Walerius (the original Breyer history diva) thought so, and listed them in her reference guide published in early 1992. The fact that nobody had one in their collection, or had found any pictures or documentation of them - well, that just meant they were rare. Really, really rare.

Now we know better: the Palomino and Charcoal weren’t even introduced until 1961 - well after the mare and foal were switched over to their Family Arabian versions. There might have been a test color or two made back then - the Western Horse and Pony were solid sellers in gloss palomino throughout the 1950s, so it was in their repertoire. But there’s no known physical evidence that the Old Mold Mare or her Foal were ever formally released in that color.

But as is almost always the case with Breyer history, the story isn't quite that simple.

In the early 1970s, when Breyer was considering bringing back the Old Mold Mare and Foal as companions to the newly introduced Proud Arabian Stallion, there was at least one test color Gloss Palomino Proud Arabian Mare made. Here’s the picture I have, from Marney Walerius’s photo album:


(No, I don’t know her current owner or whereabouts. Sorry!)

There are test color reproductions of other Old Mold colors on the newly retooled mare in this album - Alabaster, Bay and Gray Appaloosa, at least - so I’m guessing that she was created to duplicate another member of the assumed pantheon. Instead of replicating an actual production piece, however, they ended up creating a legend.

It’s possible a few others were made - test colors from that era were rarely unique. (There’s another future debunkable legend!) And Marney had almost free rein to paint whatever she wanted in the Chicago factory until the move to New Jersey in the 1980s, so she could have conceivably created more of the pretty little lady pictured above. I have no concrete evidence one way or another, though.

And as for how we’d define the models Marney made on her own, for her own devices - true tests, mini-SRs, factory customs, or something else? That’s another very lengthy topic entirely.