for saleWhoever it was who first said "everything has its time" could have been talking about the dad who's making news this week for selling the incredible memorabilia collection he's spent years building just to help his ailing daughter. Talk about timing! We're about to spend weeks agonizing over our budgets so we can figure out how to buy a whole bunch of stuff for the different people in our lives without going broke. But here we have Ken Kallin.

The man has spent three decades collecting gems like the autographs of Neil Armstrong, Bette Davis, and Muhammad Ali, and he's going to put it all on the auction block this weekend. You know why?

Because stuff doesn't matter.

That's it. That's why a man is putting three decades worth of work up for auction. That's why a man will take something he loves and sell it just. like. that.

It takes your breath away, doesn't it? That a dad loves his daughter that much?

At the same it time, it makes you look around your home and wonder what the heck you're doing, doesn't it? Why we're spending all this time amassing material goods? And why we're fretting about the holiday season?

Stuff is just, well, it's stuff. At the end of the day, the signature of the man who floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee, the scrawling penmanship of the first man on the moon, is nothing to a man whose 43-year-old daughter spends every day, whose grandchildren are living in a home where their parents are struggling to pay the bills.

Kallin's daughter, Julie Susi, suffers from mixed connective tissue disorder. It's a rare disease that shares features with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. It has made it impossible for her to work. It's put her behind on her bills. She and her husband are trying to raise two kids, but just paying her monthly medical insurance bill is a challenge.

And here her dad sits with stuff. Stuff that's estimated to be worth $5.4 million, stuff he worked hard to collect, but still, stuff. And he's willing to give it all up to give her, to give his grandkids, a better life.

I'd say that's the best lesson any of us could have asked for as we dive into the holiday season, don't you?

Will this Dad's tribute to his daughter change the way you celebrate the holidays?

 

Image via Kevin Dooley/Flickr