Eighty-Six Christmas Wreaths: The Seasonal Line Nobody Talks About
Posted by Jon on
Here’s a thing we didn’t expect to find in boxes full of muscle cars and rock bands: a Christmas range.
Not one or two seasonal sheets. A coherent seasonal line, several of them Roach-attributed, and held in serious depth.
The depth is the story
Our four deepest holdings of any single design are all Christmas:
- Christmas Wreath — 86 copies
- Christmas Mouse — 38
- Cute Santa — 37
Nothing else in 667 sheets comes close. A rock band might run to one or two copies; a Christmas wreath runs to eighty-six.
That’s not collecting. That’s ordering. Somebody bought these by the box because they expected to sell them by the box, in a six-week window, every year.
The range
Baby’s First Christmas. Christmas is for Sharing — puppy, kitten, stocking. Christmas Skiing Bear. Fantasy Wreath. Kiss Me Mistletoe. T’was the Night Before Christmas. And this:
A martini elf. Which tells you the range was built for adults as well as children — the office party as much as the nursery.
Why this changes the picture
The iron-on wall is remembered as counterculture merchandise — rock, drugs, muscle cars, dirty jokes. It was that. But a printer running a Christmas line is running a normal seasonal business, with forward planning, a catalogue, and shops placing orders in autumn for December.
The same company that printed “Grow Your Own” printed Baby’s First Christmas. Both were stock. Neither was a statement.
That’s the correction we’d offer to the way this trade gets remembered: it wasn’t a counterculture industry that also sold to families. It was a printing industry that sold to everybody, and the counterculture material is simply the part that got romanticised afterwards.
An open question
Was there a printed seasonal catalogue? A separate Christmas sample book that went out to shops in September? We think there must have been. We’ve never seen one.
If you have a transfer trade catalogue of any kind — seasonal or otherwise — we would very much like to see it: irononstation@gmail.com
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