The Island Christmas ornament and how it came to be

Vivienne’s very own kiln, residing happily in her basement, where the Shelter Island Christmas ornaments are made.

When Vivienne Gershon, along with her husband Archie, owned and ran the shop called the House of Glass, among the many items sold there, was a small selection of art supplies. The store was located at the corner of Route 114 and Duval, where the Boltax Gallery is now, with a gift shop on one side and hardware supplies and a garden center on the other. But it was the art supplies that “started it all. I’ve always been interested in art,” she explained recently, “and I used to do a little oil painting.” She took a class in Greenport, with Sidney Hubbard, who was a well-known painter of local scenes. “This was many years ago, Dorothy Bloom and I, the two of us went together and did oil painting and then I used to do a little local scene painting and I’d have them in the store.”


Several other Islanders became involved. “We were amateurs, we put our things out on weekends in the House of Glass parking lot. This was not a professional thing at all but it was fun and people would stop by on a Saturday and then — it was just for a few years that we did that — the Chamber of Commerce realized it was a good thing and took it over. They turned it into the Arts and Craft show that now takes place every summer, took it to the school grounds and the whole thing really blossomed.” 


Although she now has a booth in that show, she didn’t when it began, “I was actually working all the time,” she recalled, and ceramic Christmas tree ornaments were the furthest thing from her mind.


In fact, she had never done any ceramics at all. “Then, my son’s mother-in-law, Ruth Zabel, lost her husband and was kind of interested in doing something in the evenings to keep her mind occupied,” so when she heard of a year-long ceramic class put on by the high school adult education program and taught in the Town Hall basement, the two women joined. 


At the end of the year (Vivienne thinks it was in the early 80s) the instructor, Marie Stevens, “asked Ruth and myself, would we care to go to her house one evening a week and do ceramics, and so we did for quite a number of years.” Although she made “mostly odd little things, like ash trays,” at one point, “I thought maybe I’d make an ornament. I’d never done it but here we were working with clay, so I did the North Ferry and that was the first one.” 


Eventually she bought her own kiln, “which I have in the basement and since then each year I’ve tried to do a new one for the Island.” She tries to make about 50, using a mold to pour them all, then packs them in shoe boxes, stacked in the basement. At this time of year, they’re sold at many Island events and the Cornucopia Gift Shop carries them as well.


She is also active off-Island, belonging to the Arts and Craft Guild in Cutchogue as well as the Southold Historical Society, both of which carry her work. However, she makes a North Fork ornament, sold there exclusively, as well as a Shelter Island ornament, sold here exclusively, which “makes for a lot of work,” clearly a labor of love.


Listening to Vivienne, it’s immediately apparent that she hails from England, her accent quite front and center. When asked how she came to find herself in Shelter Island, an ocean and then some away, she laughed. “World War II was on and I was in the service in the Wrens in the Navy for three years [the WRNS were the Womens Royal Naval Service, pronounced “Wrens”] and you know, it’s the story you hear all over, my husband was in the 8th Air Force. We met over there and married over there and then came over.” They lived in Port Washington where Archie had a commercial glass business.


When one of her son’s friends said something about Shelter Island, where his grandmother had a home, she wondered where that was — it sounded interesting. “Archie knew and said, ‘We’ll take a ride out some time,’ which we did and of course, there was something about it, something fascinating about it, you know, the ferry, the whole thing. I mean we thought it was something special. 


We’d taken a few rides out here and then you know, the fatal stop at a real estate office? Griffing and Collins, so that’s really how we started here.” Initially they bought a lot on Silver Beach, built a small summer home there in 1956 and then moved here permanently in 1958 when their two sons came to school here. The House of Glass followed in 1960. Those two sons are grown now, as are her five grandchildren. Colin, the elder son, is an attorney in New Haven, and Gary, “who was always crazy about computers,” is a computer consultant in Ridgefield, Connecticut. 


It was Gary, whose enthusiasm for his mother’s work and her recent exhibition at the Shelter Island Public Library, convinced Vivienne, who shies away from center stage, to allow her ornaments and their origin to be publicized. For which the Island thanks him.