'Logued Out

I’m seeing and hearing a lot of flap lately about toys and other items being in short supply, so we’d better shop early. This is a travesty! What do they mean: “We may run out of things to buy”??  We’re AMERICANS; we shop; that’s what we DO.  However dire the warnings, I sure can’t prove it from the catalogues already clogging my mailbox. To date, I’ve received 34 and the season is young! One catalogue offers 14 artificial Christmas trees in various heights and varieties to grace my Living Room. Many come decorated with lights and some are even collapse for easy storage. Another catalogue offers a choice of five outdoor Christmas trees in various sizes with colors that change to music. Certainly the most amazing catalogue offering so far: a Motion Sensor Toilet Bowl Light, which can cycle through eight colors or stay on one. Now when I stumble through the dark in the middle of the night, I’ll have no trouble finding my destination.

None of these, however, can compare to the excitement generated by the missives of my youth. Their arrival caused excitement akin to that of the first moon landing. We received only two Christmas catalogues each year: Sears and Spiegels. If valued by the pound, the Sears Catalogue, aka The Wish Book, would win hands down. The thing must have weighed 50 pounds and held every item a kid could ever want. There were even a few things for the adults paying the bill. I’d lie on the Living Room floor to shop, since I couldn’t lift the thing, circling enough toys to stock FAO Schwartz. I knew I’d get only a small percentage of them. But my greedy kid motto was, “Ask for the whole hog and maybe you’ll get a slice of bacon.”

My favorite catalogue was Spiegels, because I found it less overwhelming and easier to navigate. I could whiz through the pages to find toys for kids my age, and its lighter weight allowed me to take it to my room for more leisurely browsing. Call it my Christmas Bible. Any ordered items didn’t arrive at our door as they do today. Instead, they went to the local Sears or Spiegels catalogue store, where the buyer could pick them up after paying for them in full or paying a little each week, interest free, called buying “on time.”   

Today’s catalogues are more sophisticated and contain items never dreamed of in 1950’s America. But I say those Old School ones provided the most excitement and the best memories.