The art behind a glass Christmas tree ornament

Sarah Plowman visits Saint John 's glassblowing studio, where master glassblower Curtis Dionne is crafting hundreds of unique ornaments daily.

As Canadians decorate their Christmas trees, a man who crafts glass ornaments in Saint John, N.B., has been busy making them.

The holidays bring in a lot of orders for Curtis Dionne at Glass Roots Studio — both online and from shoppers browsing in his store.

Sometimes Dionne crafts more than 100 ornaments a day in a well-choreographed dance with a furnace exceeding 1,000 degrees Celsius at the centre of it all.

“It’s kind of a lost art. There’s very few people doing it in Canada. So, it’s become a bit of, you know, a point of trying to uphold the integrity and the tradition of the craft,” Dionne said.

Each ornament demands precision and practice.

Like sinking a spoon into a pot of honey, Dionne dips a blowpipe into a furnace of molten glass, gathers the material, twirls the blowpipe and rolls it in colour.

“We just twirl it up like honey. And from there, we have to just keep it centered, and it’s all by feel and sight,” he said.

He holds it upwards to compress air into the pipe, so a bubble starts to emerge and shapes it with tools to create his vision.

“We do the hummingbird, the dragonfly, the bumblebee. We do a mushroom. We do a pickle. We do a potato. We do a strawberry,” he said.

Like a dance, Dionne and his assistant Owen Steel move quickly in his studio.

Each anticipate the others’ move to work as quickly as possible. For some of the more difficult pieces, like the hummingbird, they work in tandem.

“As far as when we’re working together on a piece, we can sort of finish each other’s sentences movement-wise, because we know what’s coming next,” said Steel.

Steel has perfected the last touch, adding the hook.

“While I’m doing it, I’m also sort of in that meditative, almost zen state,” he said.

In high demand this year is the pickle, an ornament that comes with a game of hide and seek by hiding it in the tree. It was so popular, they made a variation.

“Whoever hides the pickle has a special gift. And whoever finds the pickle receives the gift,” said Dionne.

Families share different variations of the tradition. For some, whoever finds the pickle hidden in the tree gets to open the first gift. For others, whoever finds it, receives good fortune. The studio has sold more than 300 pickle ornaments so far this year.

Customer Christina Morrell picked up a “cozy pickle”—a pickle dressed up with a hat and scarf.

“I’m giving it as a gift so that someone else can start the tradition of a Christmas pickle,” she said.

Heather Rogers, another customer is after the snowflake.

“I just feel like they’re unique and they’re handcrafted,” said Rogers.

Dionne knows Christmas tree ornaments can hold meaning, spark memories or thoughts of loved ones. The way he sees it, his work is a chance to bring joy into people’s lives by doing something simple.

“I think the ornaments that people put on their trees become part of, like, a lasting memory, you know, part of their tradition. And, and it gives us the opportunity to become a bit of a household name,” he said.