Vintage Precious Moments Pizza On Earth Figurine – Boy with Puppy and Dropped Slice, Retired Sam Butcher Enesco Bisque Porcelain, 1997

A boy in a long nightcap has landed on the floor with a pizza box tipped over beside him, PIZZA PIZZA printed on the lid and the slices scattered across the base. A puppy has flopped down next to the nearest one and is reaching for it with a paw. The boy's face isn't cross — just resigned. Every slice is modelled separately, a thin wafer of porcelain with the crust pinched into a thicker lip, and all of them are here, along with the puppy's ears and tail.

The title is the joke: Pizza On Earth, for Peace on Earth. Naming things this way is a Precious Moments habit — Cane You Join Us, Lettuce Pray, Owl Always Love You — one letter off a phrase everyone knows, and there are collectors who chase these puns specifically.

The line began not as porcelain but as pencil. In the early 1970s a Michigan artist named Samuel J. Butcher was drawing round-cheeked, teardrop-eyed children onto greeting cards, selling them at church book fairs with his partner Bill Biel under the name Jonathan & David. In 1978 Eugene Freedman of the giftware firm Enesco came across the drawings at a trade convention and wanted them in three dimensions. Butcher hesitated — he had never thought of the children as objects — but agreed to a prototype, and Freedman took the drawings to the Japanese master sculptor Yasuhei Fujioka, who modelled twenty-one of them in clay. Those first twenty-one figurines reached shops by the end of 1978, and the collection has run ever since; Butcher kept drawing for it until his death in 2024.

The bisque finish comes straight out of that origin. Fired once and left unglazed, it has no shine at all — chalk-soft to the touch, the colour sprayed on so faintly that the yellow of the nightcap simply fades away toward the tip. That was the point: Fujioka and Enesco were trying to keep the softness of a pencil drawing, which a glossy glaze would have destroyed. It is also why these figures show their age gently rather than chipping brightly.

The base carries the full title — Pizza On Earth · © 1997 Precious Moments, Inc. · Licensee Enesco Corporation · 521884. It was made from 1997 until it was retired in 2001, a run of about four years.

For a Precious Moments collector, a pizza-loving gift, or anyone who appreciates a good pun in porcelain.