How I got started collecting pins is a really interesting story. I have, or should have, a few pins from before pin trading officially started from doing events like Disney's Magic Music Days, but I never seriously considered collecting pins. Even when pin trading started in 1999 and my mum and I would go to Disneyland and see the pins in the stores and on the carts ... we would look at them and decide meh. They're pretty, but an easy pass. Then we went to WDW in 2002 in July ...
The first question you have to be asking is why in the world would anyone choose to go to WDW in July? For those who don't know, Florida in July is extremely hot, humid, and has an almost guaranteed daily afternoon thunderstorm. Great question. We went because I still was in school and, to paraphrase what my parents said, there's no way in h*ll that I'm missing more to go to WDW, it's bad enough that I miss so much every March for St Patrick's Day shows.
All things considered, we actually were having a great time. We were a little warmer than we would have liked, but we loved it when it rained because it both cooled things down and completely emptied out the parks, which reduced the already short, very manageable waits to virtual walk-ons. But on Friday (yes, I remember the day specifically - iykyk), we were in the Magic Kingdom when the usual afternoon rainstorm rolled in right on schedule. We went into a few indoor attractions to wait it out, like we always had done. This time, the storm just intensified instead of dissipating. Since it was getting close to dinner, we decided to jump on the monorail and head over to the Contemporary to find food.
After talking my way into getting seated for Chef Mickey's (this wasn't easy; remember, it's a Friday night AND Disney is running a promotion for free dining), we were handed our pager and invited to explore the resort until our table was ready. We accidentally stumble into the pin trading night that was taking place. We walk around, ask the pin traders and the cast members questions, and look at all of the pretty, shiny pieces of metal. We're given tons of 'helpful' advice (some of it, in retrospect, turned out to be not so helpful at all, although I'm sure all of it was very well intentioned). The next day, we went out and purchased our first pins, starting a hobby, or habit, that continues to this day, although I'm currently in the process of refining and narrowing my collections because I started out collecting too many things for the wrong reasons and I need to fix that before I can get back into actively trading pins.
