For our family, it all began with a few words from a teenager accompanying us to church one Sunday morning back in Washington state. This girl’s animated description of some funny robots and the (now infamous) kiss which preceded a dangerous leap across a gaping chasm was enough to spark my parents’ interest. Their first experience with Star Wars (1977) was followed quickly by my own. Our family was hooked, hooked on the shared experience as much as the movie itself.

You see, between those intermittent viewings that occurred with each re-release and the occasional, exciting screening at a friend’s birthday party, we had to recreate the story with our imaginations. With no video game system and no DVD or even VHS player, reliving the excitement meant actively retelling the story using a few well-marketed products and a good helping of ingenuity.

Over a few years’ time, my parents and relatives fed the flame with some of the available paraphernalia: sheets, towels, a cup and plate set (my sister got the cup), free posters from the grocery store, and a subscription to the Lucasfilm fan newsletter, Bantha Tracks. There was the occasional quarter that bought about five minutes on a cool vector graphic Star Wars video game with bulky, geometric renderings of the Death Star’s surface; and the very cool grandmother who, during one particularly fun visit, took the kids to see someone dressed up in full Darth Vader regalia at a local car dealership. Or we could just stay in the house and listen to the soundtrack I had received during my bout with chicken pox, playing the LP over and over as I dashed about the house with an imaginary lightsaber in my grip.

And how about those toys! The vehicles, the creatures, the backdrops . . . and the figures. Special figures (like bounty hunter Bosk or Emperor Palpatine) arriving in the mail after I sent saved proofs of purchase from store-bought figures, figures hiding in my dad’s back pocket during a birthday party, figures I “earned” every thirty days by eating healthily at school (I still remember the charts kept by my virtually vegan parents), and figures hiding in shiny packages or the limbs of a Christmas tree. In the innocence of my youth, I actually (horrors!) removed these collectibles from the packages and played hard with them. I can still see figures strategically placed atop Lego fortresses and sticking out from under couch cushions, figures whose lightsabers broke after extended use and whose cloaks and tiny weapons hid themselves in the depths of my bedroom carpet. And then there were the many figures buried in the folds of a coat or mounds of cotton . . . As playsets were often slow in coming, sometimes went to my sister (Marie got the droid factory), and were never that large anyway, I relied on whatever I could get hold of to remake Lucas’s visions. A carefully draped jacket in our Ford Pinto became the undulating landscape of Dagobah, a hollowed out green pepper transformed into Yoda’s little hut, and the snow drifts of Hoth behind our fireplace grew long and deep with each ball of cotton pulled from the recesses of a newly opened vitamin bottle (there were many).

When we moved from WA to TN in 1982, I tearfully took down my elaborate Hoth setup, having to cut the fishing wire on which the snowspeeder was hanging, put away the redundant snowtroopers and rebel soldiers, and threw those armfuls of fluffy snow into the trash. Things would never be quite the same.