The man was an island of calmness standing there behind a display of three chalk-like Santas positioned on top of a vintage sled.
You could almost miss him amid the bustle of Christmas shoppers at Christkindlmarkt Bethlehem, the Pennsylvania city’s holiday market that is a re-creation of similar outdoor markets in Germany, the country of its Moravian settlers.
I glanced toward him, not at him, because I’m not much into Santas. He seemed to be part of the booth but disengaged from it. Then I noticed a newspaper page lying next to his display and stopped long enough to read the headline: “Breaking out of the mold.”
The article was about him. Now I was intrigued.
This man with the quiet demeanor was Rich Connolly, who has been making art from antique molds for the last 30 years. He was selling his Santa figures – his “signature” pieces – at this year’s market, and had sold hundreds of them since setting up here in early November, he said.
He was so demure – not pushy like some who peddle their wares – that I’m sure his Santas must have sold themselves. Not jumping off the sled and hunting people down, but just standing there, their workmanship speaking for itself. I was taken by Connolly’s melding of history and art – him adding his own touches to the art of an unknown mold-maker.
He started collecting German antique chocolate molds when he was a teenager, he said, but his interest goes back farther than that. His mother Elizabeth, who died at age 80 in 2002, was a chocolate-maker who made Easter candy for her nieces and nephews for years. She was still molding candy in her final years, Connolly said.
He recalled her taking him as a child to a chocolate candy kitchen near where he lived in New Jersey. “I could see them making candy, pouring it into metal molds,” he said. “It fascinated me.”
He uses the molds to make Easter bunnies, Santas, and Halloween and other figures from chalkware. “It used to be called the poor man’s porcelain,” said Connolly, 51, of Bethlehem. His pieces are hand-painted, hand-signed and dated. He sells them in the low-to-mid $20 range, he said, to keep them affordable.
He sells them in 200 stores from Pennsylvania to New York. Jackie Kennedy collected them, and he would visit her home each year so she could select from his figures. In 1988, the Reagan White House chose a piece for its Christmas display.
Connolly has a collection of 800 molds, which he bought mostly from antique shops and keeps in storage. His oldest (the Santa he is holding in the picture above was made from it) was made in 1890, the newest in the 1940s.
I learned from researching that antique chocolate molds are collectors’ items, and Santa and Christmas appear to be the most popular. I found some on the web selling in the hundreds of dollars. On eBay, they sold for $15 to $800 (a 20″ Santa and children).
Here is a site with a selection of antique molds. Their value can depend on the detailing, whether they have the maker’s name and the rarity of the shapes.
While the drinking of chocolate dates back to the Mayan, the molds have a later history. The earliest is believed to have been made in France in the early 19th century, but the Germans appeared to be the ones who made these metal containers into an art. (Mold at right is from the site victorianchocolatemolds.com.)
Hermann Walter started making chocolate molds in Berlin around 1866 . He was supplanted in 1870 when a tinware manufacturer named Anton Reiche opened his factory in Dresden. Reiche made beautiful molds of various sizes and designs that are among the most sought-after even today.
The heyday of mold-making was from 1880 to 1930, when a number of factories turned out Santas, people, fruit, Halloween figures, Easter bunnies, animals, swords, guns and more.
The designs reflected the times in which they were made, according to a 2002 exhibit of chocolate at the Field Museum in Chicago. From 1880 to 1910, they were realistic works of art, drawn from life, with lots of details. During the Art Deco era from 1910-1930, they became more simplistic and more fantasy.
Among the others producing molds were the Dutch, Swiss (created the first plexiglass molds in 1948) and Czechs. In the United States, manufacturers Eppelsheimer and Jaburg, both located in New York City, got started in the 1880s but were shuttered around the mid-20th century.
The intricacy of the early designs was what attracted Connolly to the chocolate molds. “I love it,” he said. “I love the nostalgia behind it.” (Below are more examples of his work.)
