My parents had a friend who had tons of collections and in her kitchen she had a wall of very narrow shelves that were just deep enough and were just high enough to hold the tallest nutcrackers and all of them were displayed lined up shoulder to shoulder. She had more than 100 and there was room for expansion of the collection.

Why do they have to be displayed all together? Scatter them around the house including his bedroom!

I don't have that many although I have about 10. I scatter them throughout the house. Enjoy!

How old is your son? Did you encourage his collecting?

if he is young, and you are storing his collection all year, I suggest you
Find a table or other flat surface and let him show off his collection for the holidays!

ML

I have a collection of Santas of different sizes and materials. I've tried different ways of displaying them but my favorite is to display them all together, tall ones in back, short ones in front, on top of a simple console table in our family room.

Can they hold up the books on the library shelves? Protect the house by standing guard on the window sills? Can they be guerrilla soldiers, camouflaged in the greenery, peering out of stockings, integrated into other objets? Could they earn their keep as servants, holding soap and guest towels in the powder room or tending the corkscrew at the bar? Or, ingenious thought, standing in the nutbowl?

Can he create a Lego brick display set for them?

Do they ALL have to be on display? You could group them by color, or by theme.

Have you considered shelving? You could build it on the wall in his room and put it fairly high if needed, do one wall or more. There are some cute ideas for this on Houzz.

I am still trying things today. I think they look best scattered about the house for now. There might be too many to put all of them out. Christmas decorating is hard for me. I have a lot of things I love and want out, but then it just looks cluttered.

I think this is the time of year where organized clutter is not only accepted, but encouraged. Who among us has not started a "little" holiday collection that ended up having a life of its own?!

I have a large collection of Nut Crackers, but I haven't actually displayed them for years.

When I did, first I would remove accessories from all over the house, little trays, sculptures, vases, etc -to make room. Then I arranged the nut crackers in groups with various sizes, sometimes with bits of greenery, candles, bobbles or fairy lights. So every room had a few but no one place had a whole platoon lined up like the Terracotta Army.

sps