Vintage Holiday Designs Avocado Drip Glaze Tea Canister, c. 1964–1982

The Piece

A lidded ceramic tea canister in the olive-avocado drip glaze that defined American kitchens for about fifteen years. The body is a plain straight-sided cylinder. The lid is a wide dome rising to a squat mushroom knob, with a deep flange underneath that drops down inside the jar and seats it firmly.

The glaze is what carries it. Glossy olive over a cream body, running darker as it moves, so it breaks to a smoky brown-black along the rim, across the shoulder of the lid and around the lower edge where it pooled and ran. Fine dark specks are suspended all through it. The whole surface carries a close network of crazing with age settled into the lines, the kind you only get from decades rather than from a finish.

TEA is lettered across the front in a tall narrow serif in near-black, set large enough to fill most of the width of the jar. It is the only decoration on the piece and it does not want for any more.

Low on the wall near the foot, impressed into the clay and glazed over, the piece is marked holiday designs in lower case with H4019 and a copyright symbol beside U.S.A. The underside of the lid carries a separate mould number, 2484.

History & Provenance

The mark settles this, which is better than dating it by its colour.

Holiday Designs was a pottery in Sebring, Ohio, on South 12th Street at Baugh Avenue. Eugene T. Meskill bought the plant in 1964 and gave it that name, and it produced canisters, cookie jars, teapots and accessory ware for the kitchen and gift trade. Meskill held it until 1982, when it was sold to Designer Accents of New Jersey, which was itself later bought by Richard C. Durstein of Pittsburgh. In the consolidation that followed, the lower-priced Holiday Designs lines were discontinued. Anything carrying this mark was therefore made between 1964 and 1982, and that is the date offered here.

The glaze narrows it further within that run. Avocado green, alongside harvest gold, ran American kitchens from roughly the middle 1960s until the end of the 1970s, on appliances, countertops, linens and every piece of housewares that could be made in it. It arrived with the shift away from the clinical white and pastel kitchens of the 1950s, saturated the market through the early seventies, and was gone by about 1980, displaced by almond and a return to white. A canister in this exact olive belongs to the middle of the Holiday Designs run rather than either end of it.

The drip glaze is the other half of the story. Flowing glazes that run and pool and break dark at the edges are very old, and American art potteries had been chasing them since the turn of the century, but by the 1960s the effect had been industrialised and turned out at volume for exactly this trade. The result is a piece that looks handmade at arm's length and reveals itself as production ware when you pick it up. That is not a criticism. It is precisely why so much of it was bought and why it reads so well now.

It is also a survivor on its own. Canisters were sold in graduated sets, usually flour, sugar, coffee and tea, and the tea canister is the smallest and the one most likely to be separated from its siblings over fifty years of kitchens and moves. Finding one intact with its correct lid is more of a coincidence than it sounds.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Avocado has come all the way back around, and this is the honest version of it rather than a reproduction reaching for the look. The glaze does the work: warm olive that turns almost black where it ran, glossy enough to catch a kitchen light, and a colour that sits beautifully against wood, brass, cream ceramic and terracotta.

Use it. It holds tea, coffee beans, sugar or utensils, and the flanged lid seats tightly enough to keep it honest. Failing that, it is a good-looking object on an open shelf that happens to have a lid.