T'is the season for fun, festivities, family and friends!

This time of year it is said many times over how commercialized Christmas has become. Invariably we purchase gifts that are opened, used and then forgotten.

Not so the case with the collector. Collectors understand and appreciate the physical and emotional value of a gift added to their collection. Collectors also recognize how rewarding and enjoyable it is to begin a new collection...   

PLUS A SEASONAL GIFT OFFER FROM LDRB 

If you live in Canada, have children, ever been unemployed and are aging you owe a great debt to William Lyon Mackenzie King.

While he would never have been accused of being particularly charismatic or inspirational speaker, he was certainly one of the most interesting and influential Prime Ministers in Canadian history.

Mackenzie King led the country through three significant and difficult periods in history:

• The period after the First World War
• The Great Depression;
• The Second World War and afterwards....

It is a long held belief that a collector should find a focus of the collection and then obtain items within that focus. That is absolutely true. So the question is what does Joseph 'Joe' Patrick Kennedy Sr. and Francis Charles Jenkins have to do with early Canadiana focus?  Nothing though in spit of the Good advise previously shared I chose to purchase an item related to each of these most interesting American gentleman which falls well out of my focus of Canadiana. Why? As a collector, I thought the "stories" that accompanies each of these items were very special, interesting to me and thus I wished to own them...