There is something about a collector that defies logic.
A collector will wake up at 4am on Black Friday, stand in the cold outside a Hallmark store, and…when the gate begins to rise before it’s fully open…drop to the ground and roll underneath it like a soldier breaching enemy lines. All for a Star Trek ornament.
I know this because I was that thirteen year old boy. And I regret nothing.
That ornament…a 30th Anniversary die-cast USS Enterprise and Shuttlecraft with a stand and Kirk’s voice…was sitting on a clearance shelf, the last one in the store, practically glowing under the fluorescent lights. My mom and aunt had dragged my uncle and me along that morning for their own mission. I don’t even remember what they were after. What I remember is the gate, the crowd surging forward, and the split-second decision that only a thirteen-year-old collector fully understands.
I got the ornament. Kirk no longer speaks…the sound mechanism gave up years ago…and the box is a little worn around the edges. But it sits in my collection today as a monument to decisive action under pressure.
That’s collecting. It makes complete sense to the person doing it and absolutely none to everyone else.
My Mom’s House Had 100 Christmas Trees
I’ve been spending time recently going through my mother’s home, and what we found inside was nothing short of a museum curated by a woman who understood that a home should tell a story.
Among many other things, my mother collected Christmas trees. Not one or two. Over one hundred decorated Christmas trees of various sizes, spread throughout every room in the house…including the bathrooms. She did a few home tours during the Christmas season, and people came from around the area just to walk through and see what she had done.
Every tree had a theme.
There was a Coca-Cola tree. A gingerbread tree. A toy car tree. A military tree honoring the men in our family line who had served…grandfathers, uncles…decorated with meaningful pieces that told their stories quietly. My bedroom had a superhero tree, which I considered entirely appropriate then and still do now.
The gingerbread collection extended far beyond the tree. Figurines, ornaments, serving dishes, napkins, light-up decorative houses…an entire gingerbread world that appeared every December and transformed the house into something out of a storybook.
Walking through her things now, I find myself stopping at each piece and remembering not just the object but the person who chose it, displayed it, and loved it. A collection is never really about the things. It’s about the person behind the things. It’s about what they noticed, what made them stop, what they decided was worth keeping.
My mother noticed everything worth keeping.
The Kukri, The Comics, and The Enterprise Telephone
My own collecting history is a little more eclectic.
For years, I collected bladed weapons…swords, knives, and axes acquired from shops, shows, and flea markets. My favorite piece was a Gurkha Kukri I found at a flea market that stopped me cold the moment I saw it. For those unfamiliar, a Kukri is the legendary curved blade carried by Nepalese Gurkha soldiers…one of the most respected fighting forces in military history.
This particular one came with a military ID etched into the blade. The soldier had been dispatched to India. The date on the blade was 1917.
I held that blade and thought about the hands that had carried it before mine, the world it had moved through, the century between that soldier and the flea market table where I found it. That’s the thing about collecting historical pieces…you’re not just buying an object. You’re accepting temporary custody of a story.
I also collected comic books and Star Trek and Star Wars memorabilia for years, including what might be my most unique piece…an original Star Trek Enterprise telephone. Not a replica. An actual telephone, shaped like the USS Enterprise, that my father acquired through the phone company he worked for back when such things existed. It sat in my bedroom and somehow never lost its ability to make friends stop and stare.
The Garage Sale Goodbye
Before I moved abroad, I held a garage sale and let most of it go.
There’s a particular grief in that kind of parting…not regret exactly, but something quieter. These were pieces I had hunted for, saved for, carried home carefully. And now I was pricing them with little stickers and watching strangers pick them up.
Then a young boy came running up to my table.
He saw the Star Trek and Star Wars items and his eyes went wide in the way that only a kid who already loves something can manage. He ran back to get his mother. She came over, looked at the collection, and I could see her doing the math between her son’s excitement and her own skepticism about whether a grown man’s science fiction collection was a reasonable purchase.
She bought almost everything!
I watched them load it into their car and felt something I didn’t expect…not loss, but satisfaction. The passion had passed to another generation. That boy would grow up with these pieces the way I had, and someday maybe he’d find his own Kukri at a flea market or roll under a gate for something that only he understood the value of.
That’s what collections do when they’re released. They find the next person who needs them.
Why We Collect
I’ve thought about this a lot lately, surrounded by my mother’s trees and ornaments and gingerbread houses.
We collect because we are meaning-making creatures. We find an object, and we recognize something in it…beauty, history, humor, memory, identity. We say this matters, and we keep it. Over time, those individual decisions add up to a portrait of who we are and what we love.
My mother’s portrait included one hundred Christmas trees and a gingerbread world that came to life every December with the sole purpose of making memories with those that she loved.
My portrait includes a 1917 Kukri, a broken Enterprise ornament I rolled under a gate to claim, and a telephone shaped like a starship that no longer has a home but refuses to be forgotten.
What does yours look like? Tell us in the comments below.
If the Star Trek collecting bug has bitten you, the 30th Anniversary Hallmark Enterprise ornament still surfaces regularly on eBay and collector sites. Fair warning…once you start looking, you may find yourself standing outside a store at 4am, if that kind of thing still happens where you live. (I do it in China now.) Consider yourself warned.
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