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Monday, July 23, 2018

Ornament a Review: Eight Maids-a-Milking - 12 Days of Christmas #8 - 2018 Hallmark Ornament



Stars: 5 out of 5
Pros: Another beautiful ornament for this series
Cons: None
The Bottom Line:
Maid with pail of milk
Simple yet still beautiful
As the series shifts




A Shift in the Series

This year marks a big shift for Hallmark’s Twelve Days of Christmas series – we are transitioning from birds to humans.  We got a hint of how these final five ornaments might look with the Twelve Little Days of Christmas that Hallmark released a couple of years ago, but now we get to see the first in regular ornament size with Eight Maids-a-Milking.

The maid is dressed in a light blue dress.  Her blond hair is up in two buns on her head.  She’s wearing a white apron tied around her waist and she’s holding her milk pail, filled with milk, in front of her with both hands.  Her pail is gold and it has “Eight 8” written on it.  The bottom part of her apron is made of the same plastic that made up the wings on the birds and has a gold swirl pattern on it.  Supposed to be something?  Around the bottom of her dress are the lyrics and the music for her verse in the song.  There is no dangled element this time; the pail serves that purpose here.

I will admit this ornament took a little bit to grow on me from when I saw it in the Dreambook a couple months ago to now.  But that’s been the case with other ornaments in the series.  At first, my disappointment with the ornament was because it didn’t seem quite as fanciful as some of the earlier ornaments in the series.  However, she began to grow on me, and now I love her.

Her dress is a pretty light blue color that I think will look wonderful with the other entries in the series.  No, I haven’t dug them out of storage yet, but I suspect when I do it will be a great fit.  Yes, having a two-tone dress would have been fun, and a few other unique flourishes could have better matched the birds as well.  But there is something about the simplicity of this ornament that works.  She definitely looks better in person than she does in any picture I’ve seen of her yet.  She does have some real ribbon on her, and the fact that she has the lyrics and notes to her verse helps her fit into the rest of the series as well.  This is more toned down from some of the birds we’ve had in the series, but it is still beautiful and artistic in its own way.  I think the fact that she looks to sweet helps a lot.  There is just something so charming about her face.

None of the ornaments in the series have been able to stand on their own, and that doesn’t change here.  The maid is standing on her tippy toes, so there isn’t a surface big enough to balance the ornament.  When you go to hang her, she appears to tip slightly to the right, but I think that’s an illusion thanks to the tilt of her head.  The series marker is on the underside of her dress, exactly where you’d expect it to be.

Now that we’ve seen Eight Maids-a-Milking in full color, I’m already beginning to imagine what the four remaining ornaments in this series will look like.  But for this year, I will enjoy adding her to my collection of this series.


Original Price: $12.99

1 comment:

  1. Another good review of a delightful ornament. I have not collected this series but I am considering buying this little gem. A picture of her never quite captures her appeal. When you hold her in your hand, you really appreciate the styling and charm.

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