Hi, my name is Jim Sutton and I'm the Associate Director of Display Design
here at Longwood Gardens. Today what I'd like to share with you is our ornament collection.
This is something very few people ever get to see here at Longwood, but it is very important to our
holiday display. What this represents is over 600 types of ornaments totaling over 60,000 ornaments.
We've worked on this collection for decades, and it's very important because it's something we
use every holiday season. Just like you at home we pull some old favorite ornaments, and we're
constantly adding new ones to it. In the average year we'll use about 18,000 ornaments. If you ever
wonder where Longwood gets all these ornaments and keeps all the ornaments how we keep track of them
They're not all new every year. We don't buy new every year. We actually reuse, repurpose, a lot
of what we have. Now you're probably wondering how do you keep track of that many ornaments,
because it's a tremendous number of them. What we do is we have them in a book. This is our ornament
book, and what it does is it has all the ornaments we currently have in inventory. They're divided up
by color and by size. And then we have a sheet like this, and what this is is it lists all of
the project leaders all the trees we're planning on doing, and I determine who gets first pick
and who gets last pick. Now, I will say every year I put myself at the end of the list, which sounds
like a horrible thing to do, but I also give myself the biggest budget to buy new ornaments.
While I'm at the end, I get to buy the new stuff. But then in the following years everybody else
gets to use them. We pass this ornament book around with this list and everybody goes in order
and they get to choose their ornaments. And once they've selected their ornaments
no one else can take those ornaments and use them. And that's how we divide up what we're going to do
with the ornaments. Now the ornaments will change based on the theme of Christmas, so for example,
for those of you that have come and seen multiple years, you know one year we did a bird theme. Of
course we bought lots of bird ornaments. Now we have them in the inventory and we
may pick and choose and use from them. But we'll probably never do a bird theme like that again.
We also had a year we did fruit as a theme, so we have lots of ornaments that are fruit. They all
go back in the collection as well and they're all safeguarded in a building we call the Calf Barn,
and later on we're going to take a visit over to the Calf Barn. As I mentioned earlier, all the
ornaments are divided up by color, so you can see here in the beginning there's a color chart that
corresponds to the numbers of the ornaments. All you have to do is flip to the pages you're looking
for and you can find an ornament. For example, you would find this one you would see the number
on it, 1009, and you know from the inventory here we have 51 of these. It's a good easy way to say I
want that ornament. There's the number of the box that we're going to go looking for, and that sheet
has the quantity on it. So when we go to the Calf Barn let's see if we can't find this ornament.
In the studio, this is the ornament that we chose to come over here to the Calf Barn and find.
So now we're in the second floor of the Calf Barn where all the ornaments are kept.
So the number in the book, 1009. We know there's 51 of them, and on this we have a picture of it.
We know the number 1009, and this is also box one of four, so we know that there are four
boxes containing this ornament. And let's open it up and see if that's really what's in this box.
And here they are, same ornament as the book had pictured, same ornament as we had as a sample,
and here it is all packed away and ready for us. So you know that there's four boxes of this exact
type of ornament. I'd like to thank you for joining me today and I hope you enjoyed this
little sneak peek behind the scenes of where we keep and safeguard all the Christmas ornaments.
The Christmas display will be on exhibit from November 20th to January 10th.
Please come enjoy the season and see our beautiful ornaments on display. Thank you.
you