First Xena Shrine

Admit it, you have a Xena Shrine; a place in your house where you have gathered part (or all) of your Xena collection and have it on display. If you're like me, your Xena Shrine has taken on many forms over the years of Xena Collecting and you probably noticed during those summers between seasons, the Xena Shrine took on even greater importance during those periods of Xena Withdrawal Syndrome (XWS).

Here's my first Xena Shrine (circa 1997) and it's components are a mixture of genuine prop, fan made items, and commercially available merchandise (or XenaCrap (TM) as I'm known to refer to it).

Genuine prop: The original Xena chakram obtained at the first Xena/Herc convention in January 1997 on the left in the plexiglass box.

Fan made items: The "dead body prize" just to the right of the port bottle, I won at one of the Southern California XenaFest charity auctions. With that Ru Emerson killed my friend Sharon in one of her Xena novels. She renamed my friend Saroni, made her evil, and had her decapitated by Xena's chakram. Cool auction item. The surprise for me is that she stuck me in the novel too, renamed as Seer Krysta. There is also a silk-screened SCXF plastic drinking cup that were giveaways at the Fests. On the right is a resin chakram pin. My birthday cakes (seen in a photo) were made for me by another fan -- one had the X:WP logo, the other had a chakram design.

Commercially available merchandise: Velasca and Xena action figures, trading cards, promo cards for the CCG game, chakram-themed jewelry items, keychains, stickers, plastic costume chakram.

Items that fall somewhere in between: the cardboard promo for the Xena CCG game, the Icons chakram "rock" for displaying their chakram replica (one of the Icons guys working on their chakram product gave this to me for the original prop), and the bottle of port (given to me by another fan, we always saw Xena order port when she went into an inn).