The Benefits of Boxing Day Shopping With the Wife

I've wanted to start a blog for a while now, and I suppose the New Year is as good as any. I can't beat other bloggers for sport related content, but I hope to be able to provide some good ideas for people in the community. ON TO THE POST!


My family doesn't know much about hockey cards. They know enough that I like them, and to buy me a couple of McDonalds packs, but I'll never get to break boxes for Christmas like others do. Its up to me to find me find hockey stuff. That's more difficult than ever when the wife wants to go Boxing day shopping. From Dec 26th to the 28th, I spent 27 hours of shopping. Mostly clothes, but I can occasionally find some Hockey gems. For instance, I did find a couple of 07-08 OPC Tins at Winners (like Marshalls in the US).

At 10$ a shot, I managed to convince my wife that we could buy it from our Boxing Day budget. I didn't pull anything big (all the cards are for trade in my trade list), but it was nice to break something with my wife.

The big win of the experience was an ornament box. An ornament box is a box with a festive design for storing your Christmas tree ornaments. See all the little squares in the box? Each one is supposed to hold one ornament. The box comes with a string on either side for easy carrying and storage.

I'm generally a set collector, but I have specific player collections as well because of my admiration of goalies and certain hockey players. I don't think that any of my player collections have more than 10 cards per player, but they run the gamut from low end cards stored in penny sleeves to high end graded cards. I also have a couple of oddball cards like unopened packs and power deck cards. They're currently scattered into three different 200 ct card boxes, but what I really want is box that can keep them all together. Here's a small sampling.

It just so happens that these ornament boxes can hold card widths up to a graded card. And the nifty little compartments make it so that I can sort my smaller player collections by player all in the same box. Its tall enough to hold the graded cards and easy to move around with the attached strings. At half price on Boxing day, they were a good deal. I only got one because I was afraid that it wouldn't work well enough, but I think I'm going to grab another next year, if I can find them again. Here's a pick with the cards packed away.

From left to right.

Top Row: Unopened Packs, Ron Hextall, Grant Fuhr, Marty Turco
2nd from top: Hits I pulled, George Vezina, Jacques Plante, Billy Smith
3rd from top: Martin Brodeur, Patrick Roy, Wayne Gretzky, Maurice Richard
Bottom: Powerdeck, Expensive RC, Fake Cards, Player RC who share my Birthday

As a bonus to all of this, there is a bit of safety. If someone robs my house, who's going to steal the Christmas tree ornaments? There are still some post-Christmas deals out there, so if you want to go pick one up, bring a common card, or a top loader to test out the box before you get it.

Thanks for reading & Cheers!