Walking through the “Memories of Christmas Past” show at the Arms Family Museum this week for the preview story in today’s Ticket, I could hear the excitement in Anthony Worrellia’s voice as he talked about some of the rare finds that fill the museum this year.

I’m not a collector of rare Christmas artifacts and ephemera like Worrellia, who oversees the annual holiday exhibition, but I understand the thrill of the hunt.

Collecting seems to be an innate human trait. Maybe it dates back to caveman days and the hunter-gatherers who had to search for their food in order to survive.

We only need to go to the grocery store today, so we channel those instincts into less life-or-death searches.

Admittedly, disposable income is a driving factor in how much time and money modern-day hunter-gatherers devote to their pursuits and what they pursue, but there also are people not spending a cent while walking beaches in search of a pretty shell or hiking in search of a stone that catches their eye. We collect what we can afford.

I guess my first collection would have been Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars, although at 5, 6 years old they weren’t collectibles, they were toys, and treated as such.

I’m the right age that I had many of the “Sweet 16,” the first group of 16 Hot Wheels that Mattel released in 1968.

I still have a few of them, but let’s just say they’re not quite mint in box. They have paint chips and missing windshields that came from racing down — and flying off – those orange tracks and bouncing off of walls and basement floors.

Baseball cards soon followed and remained an interest well into adulthood.

Like Hot Wheels, they were treated as toys. I never flipped cards, but I certainly traded them with friends and carried them around in my back pocket, sometimes with a rubber band tightly wrapped around them. And I don’t want to think about whose rookie card might have ended up in the spokes of my bicycle because 9-year-old me thought, “Who is this nobody?”

At some point, they became something I took better care of, and I put the best players and rookie cards in protective sleeves.

I still have most of my baseball cards and some football cards, but I haven’t bought one since the mid-’90s. And the things they said to use in the ’80s to protect cards they now say damage them, so I may be no better off than I was when I was carrying them in my back pocket.

There have been flirtations with other collectibles over the years, but the one that has continued from childhood to today in different forms is music — from 45s to LPs (and 8 tracks) to CDs and now back to vinyl. I did some stupid things there too, like getting rid of LPs when I bought the music on CD (and now rebuying them on vinyl).

For a few years, the focus was on trading live recordings with fellow collectors. I’ve got dozens of Springsteen, Neil Young and Wilco shows and rarities on cassette or CD as well as assorted other acts who were on the trade lists of someone I found online.

But at some point, it became more about the acquisition than the music. I have CDs in my basement that I’ve never played. And since traders are anal about not writing on discs, I have several CDs that got separated from the written information, so I have no idea what’s on them. Yes, this is Springsteen, and it has to be post-2001 since there are songs from “The Rising,” but I have no idea whether it is Philadelphia or Phoenix.

Today I firmly believe the only reason to acquire music is to listen to it. I take better care of my vinyl at 62 than I did at 12. Some of those records may go in a protective vinyl sleeve, but I don’t buy albums and keep them sealed. Part of me imagines my record collection being the star of a Pixar movie that only exists in my head, and an unplayed album is as sad as a toy that’s never left the box.

So on a trip to Columbus next weekend, I’ll pick up a couple of Harry Nilsson albums on hold for me at a record store there. I have a first U.S. pressing of Husker Du’s “Flip Your Wig” (still in the shrink!) waiting for me at Cycle Breakers in Youngstown.

And if you ask me about them, I’ll probably have as big of a smile on my face as Worrellia did when talking about finding that Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer lamp at a garage sale.

Andy Gray is the entertainment editor of Ticket. Write to him at agray@tribtoday.com.