Retro 2000s Red & White Porcelain Peace Sign Hinged Trinket Box Ornament ☮️ Bandwagon Surprise Ornament Keepsake with Gold Clasp

What Hides Inside This Peace Sign? ☮️ Retro 2000s Red & White Porcelain Hinged Trinket Box Ornament, a Bandwagon Surprise Ornament

Size: 2" x 3/4" ~ New Old Stock, with its SURPRISE ORNAMENTS box.

Peace on earth, with a secret inside.

From across the room it is a Christmas ornament: a glossy red and white peace sign hanging from a gold cord. Pick it up and it opens on a little gold hinge into a white porcelain box, just the size for a ring, a folded note or a tiny gift. Call it a keepsake box, a pill box or, in the spirit of the symbol on the lid, a stash box. That symbol began in 1958 as a British designer's drawing of his own despair about the bomb. Twelve years later an American magazine was telling readers it was an anti-Christian "broken cross." Hanging a peace sign on the Christmas tree answers that argument without saying a word.

The Ornament

• Type: hinged porcelain trinket box ornament, from Bandwagon's Surprise Ornaments line
• Design: peace sign
• Hardware: gold-tone hinge, star-shaped clasp and rims, with a gold cord to hang it
• Inside: one open porcelain well
• Size: 2 x 0.75 inches
• Marked: MADE IN CHINA sticker, and a carton printed SURPRISE ORNAMENTS
• Maker: Bandwagon, Inc., Wilmington, Massachusetts
• Era: 2000s
• Condition: New Old Stock

Bandwagon, Inc., and a Semi-Truck From Massachusetts

I bought these in 2007, straight off a semi-truck load of Bandwagon's unsold stock out of Massachusetts, so they are 2000s ornaments through and through. Most of the rest of that load is long gone. Bandwagon, Inc. is a gifts-and-novelties importer, a Massachusetts corporation working out of 54 Industrial Way in Wilmington, and it claims the BANDWAGON name as far back as 1969, according to its 2022 trademark filing. Its earliest registered mark is CEDAR SCENTER, aromatic wood chips, first used in 1983, and it filed for others along the way, DENTAPICKS toothpicks among them. A lot of what it sold came in from China and Taiwan, and that is the story behind the little MADE IN CHINA sticker on the side of these. Bandwagon numbers its own goods with a letter and four digits and prints that number on its cartons.

The Surprise Ornaments Line

SURPRISE ORNAMENTS is Bandwagon's name for a whole family of little hinged porcelain boxes dressed up as Christmas ornaments: Santas, snowmen, sock monkeys, a cat in a bag and a church among them. The line stayed in Bandwagon's range for many years after my truck pulled out. Signals and Daedalus Books carried the porcelain Surprise Ornaments as their item HT6102, and their catalog pages run from 2017 to 2024, with around forty styles by the end. Bits and Pieces sells them to this day. Daedalus calls the hinges "Limoges-style," a nod to the French boxes below, and between them the catalogs list the peace sign in a blue round and as a dove. A red one is a hard one to find.

Gerald Holtom Draws Despair

Gerald Holtom was born on January 20, 1914, studied at the Royal College of Art in London and spent the Second World War as a conscientious objector. On February 21, 1958, he designed a badge for the first march of the new Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Easter walk from London to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, April 4 to 7, 1958. He built it from two semaphore signals: N, two flags held down and out at an angle, and D, one flag straight up and one straight down, for Nuclear Disarmament. Then he drew a circle around them.

Holtom said the shape was also a picture of himself. "I was in despair. Deep despair," he explained, and he drew a figure with palms stretched outward and downward, like Goya's peasant facing the firing squad. Five hundred cardboard lollipop placards carried it on that first march, half black on white and half white on green. Holtom died on September 18, 1985.

The first peace sign keepsakes were ceramic too. Eric Austen of Kensington CND made the earliest badges from white clay with the symbol painted on in black, and he read the despairing gesture as the death of man and the circle as the unborn child. The symbol has deliberately never been copyrighted. No one has to pay or ask permission to use it, which is exactly how it ended up on everything from protest banners to a porcelain ornament.

Across the Atlantic

How the peace sign reached America is its own small mystery. The story most often told credits Bayard Rustin, the civil rights organizer and close collaborator of Martin Luther King Jr., who had taken part in the 1958 march in Britain. The peace activist Philip Altbach said he brought CND buttons home from England to his colleagues. Either way, the civil rights movement used it first in the United States, and the anti-war movement and the counterculture carried it everywhere after that.

Lore: The Broken Cross

Not everyone welcomed it. In 1970 American Opinion, the magazine of John Birch Society founder Robert Welch, ran an article called "Peace Symbols: The Truth About Those Strange Designs" that compared the sign to an anti-Christian "broken cross" carried by the Moors into Spain in the 8th century and tied it to Communism and Satanism. That October Ezra Taft Benson, the former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and later president of the Latter-day Saints church, repeated the charge from the pulpit at the church's General Conference. The rumor still circulates. Its designer's own sketches say otherwise: two flag signals and a man in despair. A peace sign on a Christmas tree, among the angels and the stars, sits comfortably with the old carol line, peace on earth.

A Hinged Box With French Ancestors

The hinged porcelain trinket box goes back to France. The discovery of fine kaolin clay near Limoges in 1768 made that city a center of porcelain, and its small hinged boxes began as long, narrow cases for costly needles before growing into boxes for scissors, thimbles, powder and snuff. Later makers turned the form into a gift of its own, and the Surprise Ornaments idea puts it on the tree: a figure that looks like any ornament until it opens to hold something small inside.