For Jackie Callahan, the obsession began in 1978.

It might have been a porcelain angel. Or maybe a grinning snowman. She can't remember.

But that was the year Callahan's mother gave her a Hallmark ornament for Christmas.

Now, 28 Christmases later, Callahan owns close to 3,000, a collection she guesses is worth about $85,000.

"Yes, I'm a little obsessive," Callahan said on a recent afternoon as she moved ornaments from one knee-high tree to another.

Each year, Callahan, 55, takes the week after Thanksgiving off from her job at Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield. She wakes up about 5:30 a.m. each day that week, stays in her silk nightshirt, and decorates her Roanoke County home.

Each year, one of her three sons helps bring out the boxes.

They like the ornaments.

"It adds a little bit of life to the house," said 13-year-old Tyler, who also has a collection of about 250 ornaments.

"It's a mad house," 21-year-old Kip McLaughlin said about his mother's decorating week.

Callahan owns too many ornaments to display them all. When she finishes decorating this year, more than a third of her ornaments will remain packed away. It's tough to choose. There's no logic for what gets left behind.

On this afternoon, Callahan's house looked like a Christmas store. Plastic and metal display trees covered with ornaments lined the walls and sat on shelves.

Ornaments peeked from tree-shaped shadow boxes. There was a cat with a bell around its neck, a sea of Santas, a mouse delivering a letter. There were baseball players, reindeer, planes, trains and most everything else that runs with a gasoline engine.

Many ornaments blinked with red and green lights. Sound-activated ornaments played "Silent Night" and other Christmas songs.

Callahan has a Barbie ornament tree, a sports-themed tree, a vehicle tree, a lighthouse tree.

She has a "member's only" tree with exclusive ornaments from the Hallmark national collectors club.

"I get into Christmas pretty hot and heavy," she said.

This year, Callahan will put up close to 60 trees, only one a traditional large, green tree.

With this many knickknacks, most homes would look like a last-minute garage sale. Callahan's home does not. Each ornament has a chosen spot.

As she watches television at night with her husband, Tim, out-of-place ornaments catch her attention. She plucks them off and finds a new spot.

"I always ask him if it's tacky enough," she said. "When he says yes, I know I'm done."

Callahan's most valuable ornament is a factory mistake, a red fire truck with a black seat instead of a white one. She paid $55 for it new in 1991. It's now worth $400 to $500, she said.

Callahan thinks she probably has more Hallmark ornaments than anyone else in the Roanoke Valley. She is president of a local collectors club, which has approximately 20 active members.

She can only estimate how many ornaments she has. A computer virus wiped out her hard drive, with her ornament inventory, a few years ago.

The size of her collection rises and falls. In 2000, her Christmas tree crashed twice and smashed several of the ornaments including a porcelain heart, one of her favorites.

Now Callahan anchors the large tree to the wall with a bolt and wire. She bends ornament hangers around branches with needle-nose pliers. But already this year, two display trees have fallen with the sickening dull crash of shattered pottery.

"Super glue is my best friend," she said.

With the buildup for Christmas, and all the work Callahan puts into her decorations, the day often passes too quickly.

In the past, January made her depressed. She thought her house looked ugly and bare without decorations.

She never told her doctor.

"He probably would have had me committed to the psychiatric unit," she said.

She now leaves out some of her snowmen for the winter. Her curio cabinet is filled year-round with large pedal car ornaments.

This year, when Callahan puts her ornaments away, she plans to do a new inventory. Then she will shop.

After Christmas, ornaments go on sale.