Christopher Radko
The Christopher Radko Company is a maker of high-end Polish blown-glass Christmas ornaments. The company was founded in 1986 by the young Christopher Radko after he accidentally caused his family’s Christmas tree to topple over, breaking his mother’s precious collection of Polish glass ornaments, which were nearly impossible for him to find replacements for. The company employs thousands of Polish and other European artisans to manufacture a changing line of ornaments in beautiful designs that are carried in department stores, and collectors have bid up prices in a secondary online market of earlier, discontinued designs. Christopher Radko sold his company in 2005 to Raush, a North Carolina company that makes holiday giftware and seasonal decorations (the company still makes high-end European ornaments, but also sells mass-produced ones made in China under the Christopher Radko Shiny Bright line.
The Christopher Radko Company issued at least 50 sets of spreaders, and several spreader house sets. These were mainly made to a very high quality of design and detail, to complement the superior quality of the company’s ornaments. For obvious reasons, Christopher Radko spreader sets largely focused on Christmas themes, with also a limited number of spreader sets for other holidays, such as Easter and Halloween. The spreaders were issued under the Christopher Radko, Home for the Holidays and Shiny Bright lines, and include several ceramic sets, along with the usual polyresin handle sets.
The spreader blades are stamped with the Radko name and star logo — on the fronts of the blades, not the backs as in the case of most other spreaders. The blades are not stamped with the usual “Stainless Steel” or “China” and appear to be made of a heavier, more polished and refined steel than other companies’ spreader blades. As the packages do not indicate where the spreaders were made, they might have been assembled in the United States of blades made domestically, but it may be that the finely detailed paint work was done in the same European factories that paint the Radko ornaments.
The spreader sets issued by Christopher Radko are highly collectable, although often their prices are higher than those of other brands of spreader sets, due to the large number of collectors of Christopher Radko ornaments (who are accustomed to paying high prices for collectable ornaments).