Smurfs on Ebay!

There truly is nothing you can't find on ebay!

It began so innocently - well, as innocently as anything with me and shopping can be. I began with looking for Old Farmers Almanacs. I bid on the first one - from 1968 - and thus began a couple of months of bidding on many, many Farmers Almanacs. I have almost all of them from 1850 - 1900, then from 1954 to current. I have some from the early 1800s - 1814, 1816... but then it is spotty. Same with the period between 1903 and 1955 - I have some of the 40s, but only one from the 20s and maybe none from the 30s.

I just loved getting them, coming home and finding a new thing waiting for me that is not a bill or junk. (I'll be honest, I get far more junk mail than bills, which is good.) For a short time, maybe a month or so, I did very little to no shopping. I was holding on to money. Then around Thanksgiving I had the idea to look up bank notes. Wow!

There are a gazillion bank notes! I keep wanting to get a US bank note from prior to 1921, when they came up with the currently used plates - bills prior to that were quite a bit larger. However, no matter how reasonable the cost at the outset, by the time the bidding was halfway through, one ten dollar bill would be up to $90. Yikes. I spend too much, but I usually do it in small increments... I think the most I spent on any one item was $70. Most purchases are in the $10 - $20 range.

I bought bank notes like crazy from end of November through just around the New Year.

Then I did some purchasing here and there but nothing of much consequence... a jigsaw puzzle and a couple of small things. But then when I was sick I had the bright idea of looking up Yankee Candles. BIG mistake. I have just gotten through a very ambitious spell of candle shopping - not flavours that I could find by shopping at Yankee Candle, Illuminations or White Barn, but flavours that haven't been produced in ages. What a great find! Garden Cucumber was the first Yankee Candle flavour that I ever bought, about 8 or 9 years ago. And I have two now! I had the last remnants of one that I'd gotten but wouldn't burn because once it was done, that was it.

Not any more.

Jungle Orchid, Macintosh, Fireside, Garden Cucumber, Black Currant, Country Pear... oh, life is so good! The house smells like magic! I also found Green Grass and Rosewood Tea and Basil & Thyme. Yummy!

The candle buying has suddenly slowed, as is typical with me, but I made the huge mistake of looking up Smurfs. Oh, come now, you know what Smurfs are, right? When I was ten I discovered Smurfs at the Pickwick Village store. I think it was kind of like a card store. I would go in there every week with at least come of my allowance and any unspent luch money to buy Smurfs when they got them. I even had a couple of different mushroom houses and accessories for them.

I currently have six bids that all end around 2030 on Monday evening. Good thing - I'm actually still semi-conscious at that hour. We shall see what happens with them. There are a couple of other bidders that are interested in the same Smurfs. Sometimes, these bidding things can get very intense.

Now they still make them - they've been making them for fifty years now! And each year they make 8 new Smurfs, that's it. Of course, I'm 28 years behind on the ones just from the era I bought them originally. Then there are all the ones made prior to that, back to - yikes! - 1958. And the ones from around 1985 forward... man. I could have my own Smurf army!

Many of these Smurfs are ones I had as a kid - but there are some here I had never seen! The astronaut Smurf (a particularly good find) and the snorkeling Smurf are certainly ones I don't remember. And as I mentioned, there are now 50 years worth of these things. Even if they only made 8 new ones a year for fifty years, the math is still astronical - 400 different Smurfs! And I know that there were years when they made far more than that in one year.

I think I need a bigger house...