For seven decades, the Barker family made wooden ornaments that delighted Oxford residents. Even after the business closed, people continued to search for Barker ornaments to add to their collections.
Rebecca Barker has always loved Christmas. As a child, enthusiasm for the holiday wasn’t a choice.
“I get the tree out every year, and there’s a ton of ornaments on it,” Barker says. “You know, I just look at it and think, ‘Wow, my parents were amazing, they did all that.’ They made hundreds of different [ornament] designs.”
Barker’s parents, Charles and Marge Barker, made their hand-painted wooden ornaments a staple both in their own home and in the Oxford community. Generations of residents went to the Barkers’ homestead on Brown Road every year since Charles and Marge started selling ornaments from their own first floor each December.
The couple began selling ornaments in 1953 with four simple designs: a candy cane, a train engine, Raggedy Ann and Andy, and a choir girl and boy. The next year, the family scaled up to eight ornaments, and they would continue making a half dozen or so each year until 2019.
Though the Barkers created their first ornaments in the 1950s, they didn’t go full-time until 1968, when Charles and Marge sold their dairy cows to devote their time to making ornaments, according to a story in the Oxford Press.
A 1976 profile of Charles and Marge in the Oxford Press reported that the couple made 22,000 ornaments by hand the previous year. “That is, 22,000 hand-cut, hand-painted, hand-sewn (some of them), hand-glued (most of them), and nearly all personally sold by the Barkers themselves at craft shows throughout the United States,” the Oxford Press reported. “By last Christmas Eve, Mrs. Barker said, they had exactly 13 unsold ornaments left!”
The Barkers made hundreds of unique ornament designs over the years, from classic characters to local landmarks. Photos by Sean Scott
Ralph Barker, Rebecca Barker’s brother, took over the ornament business full-time and ran it for decades before closing in 2019. He wasn’t the only sibling to help the family enterprise while Charles and Marge were still in charge, though.
“All of us kids helped with the ornaments,” Rebecca Barker remembers now. “We mainly put the strings on them and tied the packaging up. My mom used to threaten us; she said, ‘You’re not going to college unless you do this!’ And she put us all through college, so she kept her promise.”
Like her parents, Barker became a professional artist. For 15 years, she sold painted wooden ducks in an upstairs room at her parents’ Brown Road home each Christmas, but she focused on creating quiltscapes — paintings that incorporate quilt patterns — for most of her career. Being surrounded by art from a young age, her career choice was an easy one.
Today, Barker’s tree is still decorated exclusively with Barker ornaments. Her mom would come down from heaven to kill her if she didn’t, Barker jokes. She’s not alone — plenty of local families still have dedicated Barker ornament trees. Residents share spreadsheets online detailing which ornaments they have and still need, and Barker said she still gets calls regularly asking if she has any she’s willing to part with, though her answer is no.
“There’s a lot of people that have nothing but Barker ornaments on their trees,” Barker says. “They tell me how much they love the ornaments when I see them, how much we’re part of their Christmas, which is of course, a pleasure.”
Pat Gifford moved to Oxford in 1972 and started visiting the Barker homestead each year in the early ’90s. She remembers the bins of ornaments for sale in the house and how excited her kids were to visit every December. As her kids grew up and moved out, Gifford continued to buy them ornaments from the Barkers for Christmas each year, and she even managed to get a couple for her great-grandchild before the business closed. Her Christmas tree is still filled almost exclusively with Barker ornaments this year, from the characters of “The Wizard of Oz” to a rendering of the Barker homestead itself.
“I loved going out there,” Gifford said. “The shows lasted two weeks, and it was a family affair. Many folks had brought out their children, grandchildren — you know, it was a family tradition to go and visit the Barkers and pick out special ornaments each year.”
In the early 2010s, Gifford started creating swittens — mittens made from recycled sweatshirts — and selling them at the homestead. She had her goods set up on the stove in the kitchen, near where the wassail was available for all the visitors to get a drink. Other vendors like Elaine Roesle, who created a variety of St. Nicholas figures, also sold their work with the Barkers through the years.
Part of the appeal of the ornaments, Gifford said, was knowing who they came from. The limited supply also made them a hot commodity, though she’s not willing to part with any of hers right now.
“They’re unique, and they’re locally made, and they’re special,” Gifford said. “I remember picking them out, and some of them I remember picking out with my kids.”
Janet Holmes, 62, was born and raised in Oxford and remembers going to the Barker’s homestead with her mother every year, and eventually with her son. Holmes’ mother was roommates with one of the Barkers in college and used their ornaments to decorate the tree each year.
Holmes still remembers the layout of the Barkers’ house, from the decorated side porch where guests would enter to the small, 18-inch Christmas tree with a toy train around it. The family’s larger tree in the living room, of course, was covered in Barker ornaments.
“Each room had their own fireplace,” Holmes remembers, “so of course the mantles were all decorated and would have beautiful winter scenes across the top of the mantle. Lots of antiques, as I recall … The foyer to the house that faced Brown Road always had the cutest little display of a little girls’ tea party. Me being a little girl, I was mesmerized.”
Janet Holmes has Barker ornaments depicting iconic Oxford locations like the Welcome to Oxford sign. Some Barker ornaments were miniature, and Holmes still displays those on tiny trees of her own. Photo provided by Janet Holmes
When Holmes sees posts on Facebook today asking about specific Barker ornaments, she knows exactly which ones people are talking about. The designs have become a sort of local Christmas iconography that feels uniquely Oxford. Holmes works at an antique store Uptown that has drawers full of Barker ornaments, and every estate sale nearby comes with the possibility of adding more.
“It’s Oxford,” Holmes said. “It’s just so Oxford. Nobody else had these, and it was a family that would actually open their house to have you come through, and they’d make a point of just making it magical for little kids.”
