By Kaye Ross

Ann Hallin shows off some of the 32 Byers’ Choice carolers that have decorated her home for 19 Christmases. Below, one grouping features a fishmonger singing for customers to buy her load of tiny fish.

Ann Hallin is not one of those collectors who fills her home with 134 versions of a silver teaspoon or 65 different Hummel figurines. In fact, she says, her only real hobby is cooking. Then what explains the 32 Byers’ Choice Christmas carolers in full-throated song in the family room of her Los Altos home?

Serendipity. Tradition. And the fact that, over the years, the figures became members of the family.

It all began as the product of two light hearts. Hallin worked for 20 years at Watkins Johnson on Hillview Avenue. Because Stanford Shopping Center was so close, she and one of her colleagues often went there for lunch. At Christmastime in 1987, they were wandering through Talbot’s when they spied their first Byers’ Choice figures.

At that time, Talbot’s was the only licensed distributor of the figures. There’s an interesting history behind them.

Joyce Byers, a Pennsylvania homemaker was depressed by the aluminum trees and icicles of the 1960s and wanted to create something more traditional. Using wire coat hangers and scraps of fabric, she created a host of carolers, including Dickens-ian figures and Salvation Army bell ringers. Every year, she made a new set of figures with a different theme until they were so popular that 180 employees worked year-round in a Chalfont, Penn., factory to meet the demand.

Hallin and her friend were quite taken by the figures. The friend said, “I’ll buy you one, and you buy me one, and then they’ll be free.”

They weren’t free for long. Hallin became attached to them and bought each new issue year after year. Sometimes it was one caroler, but often it was a grouping of two or three. This year’s collection is a family of four feeding a flock of Canada geese.

Hallin and her

three sons, Andrew, Robert and Jeffrey thought up lives for the dolls, creating entire back stories for the characters.

“We married people,” she said. “The gardener is married to the wreath lady.”

Hallin can go through her 32 carolers and tell about each one’s personality and their lives. Pointing to the choir mistress, Hallin said: “Isn’t she officious?”

Hallin retired in 1992 from Watkins Johnson as a senior process engineer. She wasn’t as close to Talbot’s anymore, but that really didn’t save her.

She started working part-time at Janus in downtown Los Altos. And, as serendipity would have it, Janus started carrying the Byers’ Choice figures.

So the carolers keep coming, one by one, to the Oak Avenue ranch home Hallin has lived in since 1969. The boys and girls and choirmasters and

skaters live in a drawer most of the time. But just

after Thanksgiving every year they take their honored places to belt out the songs of tradition and family that make them such a special part of

Christmas.