Iowa State University Alumni Association| online edition | spring 2006
Barb Burnett

 


SPRING 2006
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Christmas every day

“It’s a sickness, really,” says Barb Burnett as she admires a 1950s Santa Claus figurine in what was once the dining room of her 100-year-old Nevada, Iowa, home. “But it’s a lot of fun.”

Burnett, a former florist who has worked in the ISU Memorial Union Copy Center for 18 years, is an antiques collector to the bone, possessing not only a passion but a penchant for hunting down bargains in antiques stores across the Midwest. And while her entire home is filled with unique antique treasures hunted down with the help of her husband, Keith, it is probably the “Christmas room” that causes most visitors’ eyes to pop out of their sockets. The room is trimmed in massive shelving units and display cases that are positively stuffed with antique Christmas decorations – save one small shelf that is devoted to Halloween.

“At first I didn’t have a Christmas room,” Burnett says. “I would put it all up and then took it back down. But now it’s set up like this year-round.”

There just got to be too much to justify putting it in storage, she says – not to mention the fact that Burnett truly adores it all, from more than 25 sets of 1950s-style holiday bubble lights in their original boxes to German Christmas figurines that date back more than a century.

“I always loved Christmas, even more than my brothers and sisters,” she says, “and I really love the nostalgic part, the festive part. Some people get into sports; this is what we like to do.”

So how big is Burnett’s collection? “Before [an antiquing] trip I have to just sit and look and look at the stuff,” she admits. “You forget what you already have and what you don’t.”

-- K. Bruns

Read on | Unlikely warrior