St. Martin's art director Michael Storrings's first book, A Very New York Christmas (St. Martin's, $19.95, 9780312377052/0312377053), published this month, celebrates the Big Apple at its Yuletide best, but its origins rest in the City of Lights.
In 2003, Storrings and Landmark began selling the first four ornaments--Brooklyn Bridge, Washington Square, Greenwich Village and Little Italy. This year, for their fifth anniversary, they decided to "spice up" the original ornaments and add elements that Storrings included in his illustrations for the book. He cited an example in the rendering of the Brooklyn Bridge, for which the surrounding sky was originally light blue. For the 2008 version, the ornament borrows the image Storrings used in the book, which has a darkened sky and festive lights on the bridge.
For each ball, Storrings first creates a watercolor painting, which is then hand-rendered by a painter in Poland, where the ornament is produced. "I position and angle elements in a way that gives the painter in Poland instructions on how to place [them] on the circular ball," Storrings said. The illustration for the Nutcracker ballet, for instance, focuses on the stage itself, but he also plants details, such as a violin positioned below the audience and hard candies orbiting the stage like round piñatas, that nicely fill out the spherical shape of the ornament (which appears in a photograph, opposite the painting). "Each ornament is painted freehand, so it's like buying a one-of-a-kind mini-painting," he said, which contributes to the collectible quality and price. In one season, only 100-300 of any one ornament are produced, and each retails at around $140.
A native of Syracuse, N.Y., Storrings fell in love with Manhattan on a field trip with his high school art teacher, who was from Brooklyn. He came to New York for college in 1982 and never left. The places he features on his ornaments all hold special meaning for him, according to Storrings, but none more than Central Park. With more freedom to use complete spreads for his artwork in the book, Storrings explores much that the park offers: the clock tower, a carriage ride, the Alice in Wonderland statue, the Imagine circle (dedicated to John Lennon), and--the detail he features on the ornament--"skating on Wollman Rink while surrounded by all of these skyscrapers," Storrings said. "To me it is a quintessential image of a New York Christmas for tourists and for people who live here." (That's why he chose that as the cover image.) He also honored his grandfather in one landmark: "The Statue of Liberty ball was inspired by my grandfather who came through Ellis Island," Storrings said. "On the ball you can see him and his parents with suitcases." He spread the wealth among the five boroughs, too: "It would not be a New York Christmas without going to the train show [at the New York Botanical Garden] in the Bronx or a candlelight tour in Historic Richmond Town on Staten Island."
The book allows Storrings to include some anecdotes about landmarks (the very first Rockefeller Center tree, for instance, was installed in 1931 while the complex was under construction during the Great Depression, and workers received their paychecks in front of the tree on Christmas Eve), as well as quotations from famous New Yorkers. One example: "I knew that I wanted to use an e.e. cummings quote on the Greenwich Village page because I wanted to feature his home on Patchin Place," Storrings said. After he selected the poem "little tree," he made sure to put an evergreen in the window that matched the description in cummings's poem. He conducted his research, naturally, at the New York Public Library, whose welcoming lions at the entrance feature prominently on the Fifth Avenue ornament.
In the spirit of the season, Storrings has created a New Orleans ornament to help benefit the rebuilding of New Orleans, and all his royalties for his A Very New York Christmas Cocoa Vendor ornament will go to help Hope Lodge in New York City, which offers free, temporary housing for cancer patients undergoing treatment. "Christmas," he said, "is all about the possibility that dreams can happen, and you wish for things beyond yourself, hoping they can come true."--Jennifer M. Brown