Lighten up?

A collector friend asked, re Hallmark light-up Christmas ornaments: "Would tampering with the original wiring be destructive to the collecting value?"

Do you intend to sell them?, I wondered aloud.

Anyone buying such rewired ornaments will have their own agenda and they'll only be satisfied they've been rewired if they still work and they plan to use them exactly the same way. for some people, you rewiring them would increase the collectability because they won't need to do it.

Anyone seeking MIMP (mint in mint packaging) collectibles won't want your ornaments. They'll look elsewhere. Anyone wanting something pristine won't even be happy knowing you've hung your ornaments every Christmas for a decade before selling them, if they can find sealed, MIMP ornaments elsewhere.

Collectibles are always worth only what someone else is willing to pay for them. Selling them at a good priced depends on waiting for the right buyer with the right cash at the right time. Sometimes the planets align and you make a fortune (and then someone else will brand you a scalper!). Sometimes you're stuck with something you can't even give away. Sometimes people DO give things away, to a charity shop, and then some canny collector buys it from there, puts it on eBay and HE makes the fortune.

Luck, skill, patience, intuition, research, advertising, reputation... And hundreds of other factors.

The heading Lighten up also applies to the latest "Harry Potter" film, "The Order of the Phoenix", which I caught today. While it was a visual feast, and the tone was darker, was there any need for the cinematography to also be dark? I swear, many scenes looked like they were filmed in monochrome. I realise that this movie is based on the instalment with the biggest word count but it did feel rather disjointed. Maybe this was a case where you needed to have read the book before seeing the film? (So far I've only read Books 1, 2 and 6.) It seemed a lot of second-tier character interaction had to be swept aside.