Football
Legends

The Honor Rarer Than the Hall of Fame

The Pro Football Hall of Fame selects its inductees from roughly 340 eligible candidates each year. The Hallmark Keepsake Football Legends series selects one. Since 1995, exactly one NFL player per year has received the specific honor of becoming a Hallmark Keepsake ornament — handcrafted, officially licensed, hung on Christmas trees across America by fans who consider it a more intimate tribute than a bronze bust in Canton.

The series began with Joe Montana in 1995, and the selection made perfect sense: Montana was the defining quarterback of the 1980s, a four-time Super Bowl champion, the most decorated player of the era in which the series launched. From there, the annual selections have traced a continuous record of NFL greatness — the players who defined their decade, the quarterbacks whose names became synonymous with winning, the running backs who changed how the game was played, the receivers and tight ends who redrew the map of what an offense could do.

Thirty-one years in, the roster reads like a football encyclopedia: Montana, Aikman, Namath, Marino, Elway, Favre, Rice, Manning, Roethlisberger, Tomlinson, Brees, Rodgers, Mahomes, Hurts. Every era represented. Every position covered. Every team given at least one moment on a Christmas tree. The series is ongoing — which means the debate about who comes next is always active.

Dill Rhodus — Sculptor of the Legends

A Thirty-One Year Argument About Greatness

The Football Legends series has been generating debate for thirty years. The debate is never really about the ornament — it is about whether the player selected was the right choice, whether their career at the time of selection warranted the honor, whether another player should have been chosen instead. Every annual selection is a provocation to every fan of every team who didn't get picked. And that provocation is part of what makes the series compelling: it takes a position, annually, about who matters most in football at this moment. It stakes a claim. Not everyone agrees with the claim. That's the point.

The roster across thirty-one years reflects how the NFL itself has changed — from the dominance of big-arm quarterbacks in the late 1990s through the running-back era of the early 2000s (LaDainian Tomlinson, Adrian Peterson) through the tight-end revolution (Gronkowski, Ertz) through the current era of dual-threat quarterbacks (Mahomes, Hurts). Reading the selection list in order is a rough autobiography of American professional football across three decades.

For the fan who received their player's ornament — who has a Patrick Mahomes hanging on the tree next to a Brett Favre next to a Dan Marino — the series is also a personal timeline: these are the players who mattered to me during these years, captured in miniature and kept.

Decoration Tips

• 01
  The perfect gift for any serious football fan. Find their player — the one they grew up watching, the one who defined their team's golden era, the one currently on their favorite team. The specificity of the series makes it one of the most personally resonant sports gifts possible. A Mahomes fan gets Mahomes. A Favre fan gets Favre. A 49ers fan gets Montana or Rice.
• 02
  Build a team collection. Several teams appear multiple times across the series' thirty-one years — the Dallas Cowboys (Aikman, Smith, Romo, Elliott), the Pittsburgh Steelers (Roethlisberger, Fitzpatrick), the Philadelphia Eagles (McNabb, Ertz, Hurts), Green Bay Packers (Favre, Rodgers). Building a team-specific collection within the series creates a miniature franchise history.
• 03
  A dedicated sports tree pairs this series with At the Ballpark. Both series are Hallmark official sports figure collections — football legends alongside baseball legends, built with the same commitment to player likeness and uniform accuracy. For the sports household, they complement each other naturally on a dedicated sports-themed tree.
• 04
  Montana, Namath, and Elway are the essential vintage-era pieces. The three foundational quarterback ornaments from 1995, 1997, and 2000 represent the pre-salary-cap era of NFL greatness — the players who defined professional football before the current era. For collectors of NFL history rather than current stars, these are the priority entries.
• 05
  The series is ongoing — which means the argument continues. Already Christmas carries the full run from 1995 through 2025, and new entries arrive each year. Following the series is an annual exercise in debating who the most significant player of the moment is — which is, in its own way, one of football's most reliable pleasures.

Display Tips

• 01
  The 1995 Joe Montana #1 is the essential foundation piece. As the series debut and the player who set the standard for every entry that followed, Montana carries the most historical weight in the collection. Collectors who are building the complete series always prioritize this one first.
• 02
  The 2003 Jerry Rice entry is the series' most celebrated receiver. Rice is widely considered the greatest wide receiver in NFL history, and his 2003 selection at #9 fills the most significant non-quarterback slot in the series. It is the entry that positions football collectors identify as the series' defining receiver piece.
• 03
  The 2005 Michael Vick entry documents a specific era in NFL history. Selected at the height of Vick's Atlanta Falcons career as arguably the most electrifying player in the game, the 2005 entry captures a moment that subsequent events transformed in meaning. It is the series' most historically complex piece.
• 04
  Display in decade groupings to trace the NFL's evolution. 1995–2005 (the classic-era quarterbacks and the beginning of position diversity), 2006–2015 (the spread-offense era), 2016–2025 (the dual-threat and analytics era). Three sections, three eras, thirty-one players — the history of American football in miniature.
• 05
  The complete thirty-one player run is available at Already Christmas. From Montana to Hurts, the full series is in the collection. For the fan who wants to build the complete roster — every player, every year, every era — the collection is here.