Some people buy one ornament a year and can tell you where every one of them came from: the trip to Chicago, the year of the new baby, the one the cat broke and somebody glued. If you are buying for a person like that, or you are one, a box of matching red balls will not do.
Museum shops are a good place to look, because their ornaments are about something: a painting on the wall, the building itself, a whale hanging from the ceiling. Many are made for one museum and sold nowhere else.
We picked 15 from 9 museum shops and grouped them by kind, from famous paintings to Danish paper. Yes, it is early October. It is also when the shops put their ornaments out, and the good ones do sell out.
Edward Hopper painted Nighthawks in 1942, and it belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago. This is the all-night diner in brass and enamel on a ribbon, 3.25 by 2.5 inches. Three customers lost in their own thoughts is not the most festive subject, which is part of the appeal.
Nuit de Noël means Christmas Eve. Matisse designed it in 1952 as a stained-glass window, working from shapes cut out of painted paper, and it is in MoMA's collection. The ornament is enamel on brass, 3.5 inches high, and exclusive to the MoMA shop. An ornament with a proper claim to the season.
A Christmas still life by Gabriele Münter, the German Expressionist who helped found the Blue Rider group, on a porcelain disc 2 3/4 inches across with a white ribbon. The Guggenheim's page says little more than that. Porcelain chips, so hang it high if there is a cat.
The splurge. Frank Stella designed these stars for the Whitney's shop to go with his 2015 retrospective. Each is 3-D printed in plastic, roughly four inches in every direction with deliberately irregular proportions, and comes gift boxed. It is an open edition, and this one is purple.
For the person who collects places. Each of these is a souvenir of one particular building, bridge or train.
The Michigan Avenue front of the Art Institute of Chicago, with the lions by Edward Kemeys that guard it, etched in stainless steel. It measures 3 by 2.5 inches, weighs about 3 ounces, and is made in the USA by The Charleston Mint. It comes boxed, so there is nothing to wrap.
Made for the opening of the Gilder Center, the newest wing of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The facade is rendered in hand-lacquered solid brass, about 3 by 2 inches, on a silver cord. It arrives boxed. A good one for anyone who visited soon after it opened.
San Francisco's fog has a name, Karl, and here he is hugging a tower of the Golden Gate Bridge. Hand-painted glass with glitter, designed by California artist Kam Peck, about 3 by 4.5 by 2.25 inches, individually boxed. It is glass, so keep the box for storage.
A bone china bauble, 7 by 7 by 9 cm, with the Flying Scotsman in gold on one side and its nameplate on the other, on a green velvet ribbon. It is decorated and kiln fired in Scotland, near Loch Lomond. The price is in pounds and the shop is British, so check delivery to your country.
The blue whale that hangs over the Hall of Ocean Life at the American Museum of Natural History, surrounded by New York landmarks. It is cut from sustainable wood in the USA, four inches long, with a natural cotton cord. Wood is also more forgiving of a fall from the tree than glass.
A raccoon in a Santa hat, peeking out of a trash can. Anyone who has lived in Toronto will understand at once. It is metal, four inches high, from the Royal Ontario Museum's shop. Not a museum object in any sense, and nobody will care. The price is in Canadian dollars.
Handmade means each one differs a little from the photo. Glass means it needs a safe branch and a box to live in for the other eleven months.
A glass ornament, 3 by 4 inches, developed from the Hartwell Memorial Window, the Tiffany Studios landscape of 1917 attributed to Agnes Northrop. The original at the Art Institute of Chicago is 23 feet high and made of 48 panels. This version is thin glass on a ribbon, so pack it carefully.
A dragonfly in mouth-blown glass, made in Egypt, about 3.5 by 3 inches, on a gold cord. Each one varies. One catch: the shop says it may substitute another color when one runs out, so be ready for a small surprise.
Frida Kahlo painted Frieda and Diego Rivera in San Francisco in 1931, and it belongs to SFMOMA. Two artists in Mexico, Don Francisco Coronel and Jose Guadalupe Medina, made this papier-mâché ornament by hand. At 8 by 4 inches it is big for a tree, and it can stand on a shelf instead.
Both come from the shop of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, north of Copenhagen. Paper ornaments are light to post. The prices shown are in Danish kroner.
The Louisiana Angel is a regular in the museum's shop, designed by Charlotte Søeborg Ohlsen. Each is folded from pages of old issues of Louisiana Revy, the museum's magazine, so no two match and you cannot choose which you get. It is 12 cm high and 10 cm wide, and comes in a box.
A small hanging Christmas tree, 15 by 8 cm, folded from paper in several colors with red beads between the layers. It is handmade and fair trade, from the Swedish brand Afroart, and comes in a gift box. Not from the museum's own collection, but very much in its spirit.
We read the public catalogs of the museum shops. Nobody paid to be on this list, and no brand sent us samples: we have not handled these items ourselves. Sizes and materials come from each shop's own product page, which is also where you buy.
Prices can change and items sell out. When a pick is no longer listed by its shop, it drops off this page.
Three of these shops are outside the United States, in Denmark, Britain and Canada, and price in their own currency. Check delivery cost and time to your country before you order, above all for anything in glass or china.
Want to see everything? Browse all 149 ornaments from museum shops.