This week’s throwback Thursday takes you back to a story written in 2007 about Kris’s Penguins, one of the most successful unofficial series (if not the most successful) in Keepsake history.

Penguins at Play

Kris’s Penguins
A Playful Spirit Animates These Polar Pals

“Unofficial series” is a phrase you hear often among artists in the Keepsake Ornament Studio. It usually refers to ornaments with a certain theme, style, or characters that are repeated from year to year. They’re not marketed as part of a series and continue only as long as people purchase them and the artist can find inspiration to come up with good ones.

For Kristina Kline, the inspiration for her unofficial penguin series is as abundant as her childhood memories of snowy Iowa winters.

In 2001, Kristina made an ornament of three penguin pals tobogganing. In the following years, she made other penguin ornaments and created distinct personalities for the young penguin play playmates.

There’s the ringleader, the one with her eyes closed, blissed out on the fun, and the plus-size guy. Other characters show up too, like an adorable seal and a baby polar bear. Kristina says the simplified design style of the ornaments lets her emphasize frolic and fun.

She says she knew she was on to something “when people started calling them Kris’s penguins.” An unofficial series had been born.

Beginning with a light clip in 2002’s Topping the Tree, Kristina started adding “simple magic” to each penguin ornament. The penguins in Pals at the Pole (2003) twirl on the ice. In Anything for a Friend (2004), the cute penguin who’s loaned her hat and scarf to a snowman shivers when the ornament is wound up.

Penguins are hot now, commercially speaking—but they always have been popular. Kristina thanks we humans see ourselves in the playful penguin nature. Having grown up on the edge of Osceola, Iowa, she certainly relates to Snow Fort Fun (2006), on which you can pull a knob know to see a snowball fight in action.

“I remember we had one of those red plastic snow block makers that you would pack full of snow,” she smiles. “We’d make big snow forts and have wild snowball fights, just like my little penguins.”

As a series, “Kris’s Penguins” may be unofficial—meaning it could end at any time—but there’s really no end to the playful spirit that inspires it.

Reprint of: “Kris’s Penguins, A Playful Spirit Animates These Polar Pals”
Hallmark Keepsake Ornaments, The Inside Stories From the Artists Who Create Them by John Peterson.