A Family Who Collects!

Its true, our family is quite fond of collecting, we all seem to have our favourite things, Claire's would probably be fabric, Mum is definitely a good collector of chickens and hens (not the real variety but the ceramic sort) Dad, I'm not quite sure what he collects, when we were growing up he collected the bird card's inside his favourite tea box (i can't quite remember what the tea was called but the box is still purple), I collect a lot of things like cake stands and tea cups, Nana had a great collection of salt and pepper shakers and still has quite the large collection of clowns, but our Brother probably has one of my favourite collections. He collects old ice buckets, and has quite a few of them too, at last count there were 27, but it could well have grown by then. He has lots of nice old wooden ones, with copper rings, some nice round orby ones and lots of leather bound ones and a few patterned ones too (i like the tartan one and the one with the world map on it best).

The thing I like most about Shaun's collection is that he doesn't really do much of the purchasing, himself, one day he just said to us, I think I want to start collecting ice buckets, soon after I found him one at an op-shop and then Claire found a few more then Mum found a couple and Dad pitched in to and then sooner or later his collection was huge. Not long ago I asked him how many ice buckets he thought he actually brought himself and he said maybe one, but that's okay because it still is his collection, he built a shelf for them all above his window, and keeps all of them in good view for people to look at, and likes them very much. I think that's the whole point of collecting too, allowing people to see something and think "I'll get that, that will go nicely with so and so's collection", and before you know it, the collection is huge.

I took the above photo's of the ice buckets as displayed in Shaun's room, just to prove that they are his and he likes them very much.

From Meaghan.