Baby Gifts Original Watercolors,

Original Art Birth Records -- Unique Personalized Baby Gifts -- the ultimate Collectible Keepsake for Baby -- Original Water Colors Original Art Birth Records Unique Personalized Baby Gifts Original Watercolors, the ultimate Collectible Keepsake for Baby Baby Gifts by Ella Water Color Artistry by Professional Artist Ella Miller To begin a dialogue with Ella about the original water color commemorative you envision, select Query Form above to give her the details of your idea on a form, or select Contact Ella to email her. Welcome Options Prices Query Form Order Form Special Orders Meet Ella Links Contact Ella Note s from Happy Customers: Ella, The announcement arrived yesterday and it is beautiful. My sister and brother-in-law will treasure it. Thank you for your timeliness as well. This is simply a perfect gift. Mona "Hi Ella, Well, my friends in Australia received your watercolor print on July 4. They thought iwas absolutely fantastic, and such a lovely reminder of the birth of thier little boy! Thank you again for another beautiful piece of art! I'll be sure to recommend you to any of my friends who are looing for a unique gift of love." "Ella - I got the painting! It looks fabulous!!!! I absolutely love it and I can't wait to give it to my friends. I will definitely contact you in the future for more gifts. Hope all is well and let me know if you come up with some new designs. thanks again...Andrea" "Hi Ella, I just received the artwork in the mail today and it looks wonderful, It isn't what I expected, it is even better. I'm sure that my friend will cherish it! Everyone that I have shown it to so far thought that it was great. We usually send flowers to people when they've had a baby, but this is so much better and costs about the same. Thank you so much for all the hard work and time you invested into this gift! I'm going to recommend this to others, and I will probably be in touch with you again." "Dear Ella, I received word today that the birth record arrived in Las Vegas. I spoke with her mother and she told me that they absolutely thought it was beautiful and really love it. I would like to thank you for all your help and attention that you gave my order. Please know that I will definitely use this again as another baby gift. In fact, I have a niece that is due in March, you will be hearing from me." "Received the package and it looks wonderful! Thank you so much - I would recommend your site and your work to anyone. I know my friend is going to love the announcement!" "Ella...The birth record arrived this afternoon safe and sound...AND in 2 days!!! I absolutely LOVE it!! We are all so impressed at how much the little angel looks like Angela!! Than you so much. You did a terrific job and I am so very pleased!!! Thank you for your special touch! "The birth announcement is beautiful. It was at home when I got there the day I e-mailed you. Michele is very pleased. You do lovely work." "Thank you so much for the beautiful birth record!...It arrived safe and sound and brought such a sweet smile to the mommy's face. Your work is great." "Thank you for creating such lovely things." "My sister and her husband loved the wall hanging. Thanks for doing such a great job. What a wonderful family heirloom!" "I just received the painting and it's just gorgeous!!!!!! I'm thrilled with it and cannot wait until Mom and Dad's anniversary to give it to them. You did a wonderful job!! Thank you so much again - I'm very pleased with it and you should be very proud of your work." "You did a wonderful job on the announcement!!! You are so talented. It was a pleasure working with you and I plan to refer you to many friends!" Visitors since June 7, 1999 To the ^ Top

Birthday Presents || Special

GDR Souvenirs - Birthday and Anniversary Presents Preface || Introduction || Official Gifts || Gifts to the Party Birthday Presents || Special Items || Site Map Information || Guestbook || Picture galerie Birthday and Anniversary Presents by Andreas Michaelis One might be forgiven for thinking that birthdays, even those that come in round figures, are essentially private or indeed contemplative occasions. Not so, if the birthday boy happens to be the head of a state or Party or is in some other way in the public eye. In that case, a birthday becomes a public event. The guests can no longer be hand-picked, nor the tidal wave of presents averted. Gifts made to GDR leaders, if they were of the right kind, tended to end up in the museum. They included both highly individual pieces and items off the mass production conveyor belts. These souvenirs sometimes commemorated significant social occasions, sometimes insignificant; some were presented by governments, some by ordinary working people; and, while some might be suited to the personality and office of a president, others were given in friendship or comradeship. Along with presents to mark birthdays or other occasions in the lives of the state and Party leaders, there are certain items that were presented by home or foreign givers on particular GDR anniversaries. Most of these, and the oldest too, were left by Wilhelm Pieck at his death. One remarkable for its origins was given to him in Moscow in December 1943: a desktop calendar handcrafted out of wood for the Communist leader by German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union. The red crayon inscription reads: Unity and peace to the German people - Wilhelm Pieck - From antifascist prisoners of war in USSR p.o.w. camp 158. Three presents given to Wilhelm Pieck in Soviet exile in 1936, on his sixtieth birthday, have survived. They were made by Soviet industries, using material from the current production line, and represent a kind of gift that seems to have appeared for the first time in the USSR in the 20s. These presents signalled a deliberate rejection of feudal or bourgeois traditions and a liberation from the material and artistic values of an old societal system then supposed defunct, and their meaning to the recipient lay purely in their symbolic function. Doubtless it would be going too far to suggest that there was an individual artistic style of expression peculiar to socialism as practised in the Communist bloc countries - but it remains true that this kind of characteristic symbolic gift was in evidence in almost every east European country till the late 1980s. The workers at the factory or plant in question would normally be identified as the givers of presents of this sort. Thus Wilhelm Pieck was given a ball-bearing mount by the workforce at the 1st State Ball-Bearing Works, a clock (inevitably) by the workforce at the 2nd State Clock Factory in Moscow and a smoker's set made of cogwheels by the Sergo Orjonikidse Machine Tools Works. In 1954 the workers at Zeulenroda furniture factory took Pieck by surprise when they remembered an anniversary he had probably forgotten himself: in 1894, the President, then an apprentice carpenter, had joined the German Woodworkers' Association, and his fellows in the craft were keen to mark his diamond jubilee as an active member of the trade union movement. On the side of the chest they made to celebrate the occasion is an image of Stalinallee (Stalin Avenue) in East Berlin, which East Germany touted as the premier socialist street in the capital of the GDR. Naturally the Communist bloc had another tradition, first practised in the Soviet Union: the naming of cities, factories, co-operatives, streets and public amenities after prominent Communist personalities, often when they were still alive. A danger was concealed in this kind of honour, however. If a personality fell out of favour, or was downgraded by his successors, the names all had to be changed. Thus cities, works and streets named after Stalin were renamed almost immediately after the 20th congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956, and Stalin memorials were toppled. Stalin was dropped from the leadership hall of fame. The boulevard once known as Stalin Avenue became Karl Marx Avenue, which it remains to this day (though the names of other leading Communists have been largely removed following the velvet revolution in eastern Europe). In 1946, for his seventieth birthday, Wilhelm Pieck, then leader of the German Communist Party in the Soviet zone of occupation, was given a number of china figurines and a metal sombrero by the Party's cell in Mexican exile. Rather more useful, no doubt, was a cigarette case embellished with portraits of Lenin and Stalin which he received from Soviet comrades for his seventy-fifth birthday. One motif that recurs insistently in the presents given to him on that birthday and his eightieth is the first of the GDR's five-year plans. It was launched in 1951 and declared over in 1955, ahead of schedule, the targets more than met. Even at that date, the propaganda that accompanied the beginnings of an East German planned economy could be grotesque, and the items that recollect this phase will doubtless tickle many now. It would only be fair, however, to bear in mind that in the first decade of the GDR's history the struggle to fulfil plans was accompanied by a genuine sense of a fresh start, a new and energetic departure - and in this respect it was finally a more honest thing than the ossified, dogmatic planned economy of the 70s and 80s,with its clichés and hot air. Slogans such as Peace - Reconstruction - Prosperity, or the five-year plan emblem together with its motto The key to our success, are eloquent not only of the political vocabulary favoured during the 50s but also of the hopes and longings of the East German people. Among the many activities mounted by the Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth) was the Wilhelm-Pieck-Campaign , intended to prompt greater effort by the country's young people and the working population in general, to mark the President's eightieth birthday. On this occasion, the apprentices at the Bitterfeld electrochemicals combine gave Pieck a stylish folder containing documents and statements concerning their FDJ group. At their deaths, Pieck and Grotewohl left several hundred folders of this kind, with enough material for a hefty tome, or a feature-length satirical programme. Elsewhere, workers in factories set a good example in cost-cutting. If honorific gifts were produced in series, a given item could be made at a fraction of the cost of an individually-crafted piece. The figure of a muscular miner in a combative attitude, an optimistic expression firmly on his face, was far and away the most frequently given present for Pieck's eightieth birthday. He received numerous gifts from comrades in the Federal Republic too. Most of them were little items with some local connection, such as a figure of Roland from Bremen , or one of Hamburg's typical Hummel figures . The GDR leadership's duties routinely included visits to factories. These visits served primarily to demonstrate the closeness of the state and Party leadership to the working classes. In 1953, Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl visited the Ernst Thälmann Polygraphics Works at Saalfeld. He may have been critical of the work being done by the graphic artists and designers there; at all events, for his sixtieth birthday the following year he was presented with an entire collection of draft designs for new product labels. In the 50s, in addition to the obligatory gift, a leader might be honoured by having a work team (at least) named after him. Long before he officially took over the reins of the state and Party, Walter Ulbricht was so popular that labour collectives bore his name as early as 1953. For his sixtieth birthday, one of his work teams presented him with a desktop set praising his endeavours on behalf of peace, unity, democracy and socialism. Ten years later, as chair of the GDR's Council of State, he received for the first time one of the traditional presents from the Soviet armed forces in Germany - generally bombastic and symbolically top-heavy affairs. That first gift was a model of a Soviet cosmonaut memorial. A present from the Soviet armed forces to Otto Grotewohl has survived too, a figure reaching for the stars and thus symbolizing humanity's unceasing striving after higher things - an allegory that recurs frequently in Communist and socialist iconography. The Honecker era, too, in due course provided the Deutsches Historisches Museum with a number of anniversary presents. The desk set given to Erich Honecker, on his sixtieth birthday, by Lieutenant Colonel Kurkotkin, commander in chief of the Soviet armed forces in Germany, and bearing a personal dedication, particularly intrigues all who see it. The martial character of the set was no doubt intended to convey that the SED First Secretary could count on the massed firepower of the Soviet Union behind him, and thus settle in to a quiet period in power. The composition - typical in approach, given its origin - does in fact include a number of useful items, regardless of its military character and offputting design: a radio, a thermometer in the TV mast, a calendar, and four ball-points disguised as missiles. Ten years later a Soviet-German joint-stock company, SDAG Wismut - which was the last company in East Germany to remain under partial Soviet administration and control (till 1990), because of the uranium it was mining - presented a conversation piece inspired by mining. The bismuth workers, honouring an established tradition, selected a particularly fine mineral sample. The musical box they built into the sample seems never to have been used. On the same occasion, Honecker was presented with a pick by the Senftenberg Brown Coal Combine. It was not to be the last he received in his lengthy career as head of state and Party. It was not only the leaders of state and Party that were given these heavily symbolic presents; the tradition was observed at every level of the state and Party hierarchy. Stasi boss Erich Mielke kept a trophy room, as it were, at his headquarters in Normannenstrasse. Numerous honorifics are now on display there, gifts to Mielke or the ministry on a variety of occasions. Some were passed on to the Stasi ministry's information centre, whence they were made over to the Museum für Deutsche Geschichte in 1990. There are the usual plaques and tapestries, but one of the Stasi ministers birthday presents was a rather unusual model of an electric oven. In the GDR, 7 October was a national holiday, an annual celebration of the establishment of the first German workers' and peasants' state, and the date was marked with a grand parade, a government ceremony, and countless local festivities around the country. And every five years, on jubilee occasions, the state and Party leadership celebrated in lavish style. Leaders from friendly countries, and representatives from around the world, would pay their respects to the GDR. Again, it is the presents made by the Soviet armed forces that are especially striking. The model of the Soviet memorial in Treptow Park, which symbolizes the liberation of Germany from fascism and stresses the role played by the Red Army, was a gift to mark the GDR's silverjubilee in 1974. The outsized helm presented to Honecker on the 35th anniversary by the Schwerin SED regional leaders alluded to the well-worn image of Erich Honecker as the great helmsman of state. The accompanying letter is a gem, sparkling with all the routine phrases that had become de rigueur among the Party leadership echelons. The regional first secretary thanks our dear comrade Erich Honecker for his outstanding personal contribution to the conception and realisation of policies designed to assure the happiness of the people and the safeguarding of peace, and asserts that the people of our region are paying tribute to these fine socialist politics by making greater endeavours than ever before, in every field of society. By the time of the 40th anniversary celebrations, however, a gloomy knowledge of imminent upheaval darkened the leaders' festivities - though surely none of them could suspect at the time that it was to be the GDR's very last birthday.

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Unique Anniversary Gifts SEARCH advanced search GO SHOPPING Store Directory Gift Baskets Flowers Food & Beverages Books Travel Guides Music & Leisure Apparel Artists' Gallery Gift Ideas Gift of Month Club CUSTOMER SERVICES Welcome Newsletter Privacy Policy Ordering Help Return Policy Gift Certificates Corporate Gifts Testimonials 1-877-947-6233 ARTISAN DIRECTORY Food & Beverages Books, Music, etc. Apparel Artists' Gallery ON WISCONSIN Virtual Tour Wisconsin Recipes Links Unique Anniversary Gifts Unique Wedding Anniversary gifts and gift ideas from Wisconsin. Personalized anniversary gifts and more . . . including unique anniversary gifts for him, for her, for a couple, or parents. You will also find wood anniversary gift ideas, personalized pottery gifts, clocks, glass, candy, desk sets, vases, jewelry, unique gift baskets and more. Personalized Wedding Anniversary Gift Wedding Anniversary Plate This Wedding and Anniversary Plate is the perfect gift for those special occasions. Hand-made by Cam-Rock Clay Works artists, this plate is 11 inches in diameter and comes in the "Rose" design which features a finely-crafted blue rose on the left.The names and date are painted to the right of the design. Other Camrock Clay Pottery Anniversary Gift s Gift for Her Gift for Him Gift for Couple Unique Gift Ideas Wood Glass Pottery Custom Portraits Personailzed Gifts Gift Baskets Wisconsin Themed Wood Bud Vase These bud vases are skillfully handmade with Wisconsin hardwoods by DHH designs. Each unique wooden piece is individually handcrafted and highly polished with a natural finish. Custom Portraits Charcoal Portrait Artist Catherine Williams will create for you a personalized, custom charcoal portrait from your photograph. A great anniversary gift idea for that special couple. Unique Anniversary Gifts Pottery Heirloom Home Platter are custom hand-painted works of art, using photographs provided by the customer. A unique personalized anniversary gift certain to be cherished. Clocks Cherry Wood Clocks are skillfully crafted and handsomely designed. Each clock features and highlights the exquisite elegance of Cherry Wood. A unique anniversary gift idea. Glass Garden Plate A decorative and useful plate, since the colors are food-safe. Clarecastle Designs uses the fused glass process for extra durability. The 3-dimensional effect and vibrant colors make this plate absolutely beautiful. Gift Baskets for that Special Anniversary Couple Badger State Pride Gift Box Features a Wisconsin State Cheddar Cheese surrounded by heavy cuts of Wisconsin cheese. A perfect Wedding Anniversary gift for a Wisconsin couple. Nueske's Breakfast Basket This Basket has everything you need to prepare a great-tasting traditional breakfast around Nueske's two best-selling bacon specialties. A great taste treat for the anniversary couple. Taste Of Wisconsin Send the gift with lots of taste. The Taste of Wisconsin Gift Basket from Fruit Ranch is loaded with great foods made in the state of Wisconsin. Other Wisconsin Made Specialties Store Directory Legal Notice Privacy Policy Ordering, Shipping, and Security © 2000-2004 Wisconsinmade.com Hosted by Tushaus Computer Services, Inc.