A collection that melts her heart

An American woman’s horde of all things M&M’s cost thousands of dollars and threatens to spill into the garage

You might think that the big yellow plastic display rack is a piece of garbage. The folks at Wal-Mart did. That’s why they were throwing it out. But to Lisa Burdette, the shelf was pure gold.

About five feet tall, round and smooth, the display rack was made by the people who make M&M’s candy. It has the familiar grapefruit-yellow colour of an M&M’s peanuts bag, it carries the M&M’s logo, and best of all, for a $10 (Dh30.6) donation to the store’s charity fund, it’s now hers.

Burdette, who lives in Maryland, USA, is obsessed with hunting down anything that has to do with the candy-coated chocolate morsels. She has filled a room. She plans to expand into the garage.

But first, before we get to the list of the hundreds of M&M’s items with which Burdette has stuffed her house, the question must be asked: Why?

No solid reason

After all, Burdette likes M&M’s but doesn’t eat them often and doesn’t even like candy very much. She doesn’t think all the stuff that fills her son’s old bedroom has been a particularly shrewd investment; she thinks she’s probably blown too much money on it.

She doubts that it will appreciate much in value, though she imagines passing on the collection to her children. Burdette also sheepishly acknowledges that she’s not too interested in the candy’s history.

“I’m obsessed,” said Burdette, 43. “I am telling you, I am obsessed with M&M’s.”

All she knows is that when she sees something related to M&M’s, she buys it on the spot if she can. She thumbs through the catalogue that arrives in the mail from M&M’s World in Las Vegas.

If she happens across an M&M’s doodah at the grocery store, she moves in with the urgency of a Wall Street arbitrageur. She knows not to wait for sales on seasonal items - an M&M’s Easter basket, say - after the holiday passes.

“I go out and buy it so nobody else can. I won’t wait. I go out and pay the full price. I can’t wait to take the chance on them being gone,” she said.

Over to Werner Muensterberger, a New York psychiatrist and author of the book Collecting: An Unruly Passion: Psychological Perspectives. He said the impulse to amass a collection of objects is natural and perhaps as old as hunting and gathering.

Finding and buying things provides a sense of security. It allays a feeling of loneliness. It might help define one’s identity.

The need is instinctual, derived from an infant’s earliest stages of development, when grasping objects takes the place of latching on to mum.

Muensterberger said the act of finding and buying is akin to having a security blanket. It is not uncommon for collectors to take an object with them to bed, he said.

“The object becomes personal. It gives the objects a soul,” he said.

But, he said, it is useful to distinguish between collecting and hoarding. Collectors scrutinise their acquisitions, selecting some and rejecting others.

Hoarders gather anything they can get their hands on. Collectors also tend to be less fixed to the idea of keeping objects. They might buy, sell, exchange or occasionally consume their objects. Hoarders don’t.

A person who fills his humidor with a discriminating selection of cigars and consumes them as the occasion calls for is a cigar collector. A person who fills his cupboard with any kind of cigar and never lights up might be a hoarder.

Recent fascination

For Burdette, the fascination with M&M’s began about six years ago with her husband, Larry, 57, a golf course groundskeeper. He started buying M&M’s items after he picked up a plastic figurine of an orange M&M wearing a baseball hat.

Then Lisa, a mum who drives a school bus, took over.

The M&M’s room is kept under lock and key. To step inside is to enter a floor-to-ceiling kaleidoscope of browns, yellows, reds, oranges, greens and blues - the colours in the M&M’s spectrum.

On the ceiling, each on a hook, hang dozens of Christmas ornaments.

On the floor, on the walls, in what used to be a closet are candles, coffee mugs, neckties, hats, jackets, shirts, teapots, Easter baskets, pillows, cookie jars, cookie tins, key chains, candy dispensers, cast metal toy cars, a series of unused bank cheques with M&M’s cartoon characters and bags of unopened candy from Mexico and other countries.

There’s an M&M’s Time Capsule Kit to commemorate the new millennium. There’s a calendar, price tag $250 (Dh917), that works like the Book of the Month Club because a few months arrive in the mail at a time.

“I think the cheapest thing I have is $2.95 [Dh10.8],” Burdette said. She estimates the lot is worth $60,000 (Dh220,200), but she’s not sure.

© Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service