Hamburg - Glittery stars, ornaments piled on ornaments, tinsel and wooden figures: The practice of digging deep into the decoration box will be part of Christmas 
2008. 

People tuned in to tradition are delighted by such displays, while purists are horrified. But Christmas is a time when contrasting worlds of taste collide but still manage to celebrate the holiday peacefully together under the Christmas tree. 

The two conflicting decoration styles seem to have particularly inspired younger designers who have used entirely different forms in their creche and incense smoker creations. 

Kerstin Maenner, who oversees Christmasworld, a trade show in Frankfurt, describes the development as the making Christmas kitsch younger. There is an ever-increasing number of companies that have taken up the trend and begun to offer abstract products. Experts say the decorations are aimed primarily at people in their mid-30s. 

"When you have your own kids, you want to revive Christmas traditions," said Sabine Koppe of a Hamburg-based organization that follows trends. "But you find out your tastes have changed. The way a person dresses and decorates usually indicates how he or she would like to decorate for Christmas, and the appropriate accessories have to be found." 

This experience was the same for Franziska Ermert and her designer colleagues at the Duesseldorf company es. A few decorations were brought out for the first Christmas after the birth of her first child. "Otherwise, it was just hard to find something that fit in a modern apartment with the exception of a few expensive items." 

So they got busy and produced, among other things, a creche for everyone "who maintains old customs yet loves the modern." An example is a representation of the holy family optically cut out of a metal plate and placed under the Christmas tree. Folded up, the creche is ultra flat and makes a nice Christmas gift. 

"I could make that myself," is often the first comment that Andre Ruman hears about the creche, which he sells in his shop Corpus Delicti in Hamburg. The search for a touching Jesus child in the piece is fruitless. Instead there are nine large building blocks, one small building block and an abstract cradle. Mary, Joseph, Jesus, oxen and donkeys stand on the blocks. 

"It is an architectural or artistic thing," said Ruman. He doesn't believe that someone just took a saw and made a creche copying a puristic one. The creativity is inspired in any case. "It arouses people's instinct to play. Sometimes they arrange the blocks anew or stack the figures on one another." 

Apart from the creches, designers have also reworked the appearance of the traditional wooden incense smokers. At Alessi the figures remain small and colourful, but many other makers are going toward the abstract. One example among the new modern smoker designs is an untreated piece of oak wood on an iron plate. 

The designers at es have made a porcelain smoker in the shape of a small Fujiyama with a platinum glaze. Maenner said such designs show very clearly that Christmas decorations are losing their seasonal character. (dpa)