By the 1950s, innovation in plastics and injection-molding meant that snow globes could be made even more cheaply. Even the “snow” that floats around inside the globe, called “flitter” in the business, could be made from plastics—no need to use marble, bone chips, or ground rice anymore (mass-produced plastic glitter, which was allegedly invented in 1934, became part of the snow globe story only later). The water filling the globes was also frequently mixed with glycol, to make the snow fall more slowly, although sometimes it was mixed with far more lethal substances. At least one manufacturer, McMichael told The New York Times, began mixing antifreeze into the water to keep the globes from freezing and cracking during shipping. Stories of children becoming ill after drinking the water from snow globes sometimes made headlines, including one about children who became seriously sick after drinking snow globe water taken directly from polluted Hong Kong Bay.
Etsy seller TheTwistedTiara managed to combine the classic beauty and grace you find in ordinary snow globes with a ghost story to create a ballerina dancing near a grave while holding her own bloody head in her hand. By far the most delightfully gory snow globe in existence is this wonderful Halloween promotional product that shows Michael Myers attacking a teenage girl in a swirl of floating blood-colored sprinkles. If you really want a snow globe that will get people talking, this is it. Additional info at personalised snow globe.
The first mention of a snow globe featured a man with an umbrella displayed at the Paris Exposition of 1878. Eleven years later at the 1889 Exposition, visitors came to marvel at the steel structure of the Eiffel Tower. There are no examples remaining of these first souvenir globes – but others introduced later suggest that domes were created to commemorate the inauguration of the Tower. The concept quickly became popular throughout Victorian Europe featuring religious themes and pilgrimage sites. “Snow domes are not only fascinating to look at, to hold, to play with, they are folk art”, says collector Nancy McMichael, author of Snowdomes(Abbeville Press). “They are a bridge back to an idealized past we think existed but is actually in our head. It is something we carry with us.”
Thomas Edison invented the first string of electric Christmas lights. Edison brilliantly displayed a string of lights outside his workplace, the Menlo Park Laboratory in New Jersey, in 1880. The first people to see them were train passengers riding by the building. It was Edison’s partner, Edward H. Johnson, who took the idea and applied it to Christmas trees. He was the first person to hand wire 80 colored light bulbs and wrap them around his Christmas tree. Prior to this idea, people would try to light up their Christmas trees with candles. Source: https://www.qstomize.com/collections/custom-snow-globe.