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In 1927, a Pittsburgh man named Joseph Garaja filed his application for a patent for a liquid-filled novelty paperweight that improved upon previous designs; the design he presented and later sold was a fish floating in sea grass. But it wasn’t Garaja’s under-the-sea theme that impressed the industry. His real contribution to snow globe manufacturing was in pioneering the now-obvious method of assembling the globes underwater to ensure they were entirely filled. This, David Bear wrote for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2000, “revolutionized” the snow globe industry: “They went from being expensive mementos individually crafted by skilled artisans to items that could be cheaply mass-produced and sold.” Which they were: In the 1930s, William Snyder, a New Jersey entrepreneur, began selling souvenir globes for $1, around $18 now. Snyder would later earn two patents related to snow globes and his company, Atlas Crystal Works, would become a major manufacturer of the items.

Following in the style of Walter Martin and Paloma Munoz’s realistic and detailed snow globe creations, the Danish architectural firm Ja-Ja made a special series of snow globes to celebrate Christmas. These creations show what the “Nisse” (a small Scandinavian mythological creature that helps around the house) are up to in modern times. This particular globe shows a Nisse working away on a rooftop garden just out of sight of us silly humans. Additional info on custom 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.”

American G.I.s stationed in West Germany after the World War II helped turn nutcrackers into Christmas decorations. Arlene Wagner, a curator at Leavenworth Nutcracker Museum in Washington, told Slate that soldiers remaining in Germany after the war sent back the dolls to America as Christmas gifts. Later on, American soldiers would help keep the German nutcracker business afloat as East German manufacturers would export their nutcrackers to West Germany knowing that American soldiers would scoop them up. Source: https://www.qstomize.com/collections/custom-snow-globe.