Wishbook

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

We’re basically 40 days and 40 nights away from Christmas, so it’s definitely time to write a letter to Santa in order to make sure you get everything on your wish list — this is, of course, you’ve been nice this year and not naughty — or you can get elected president and just have immunity, which may or may not apply to Santa’s list the same way it does to the U.S.

Supreme Court…

In any event, it’s the holiday season, and this time of yer always reminds me of when I was a kid and around this time each year, the Holy Grail of Christmastime would arrive in the mail — the Sears Holiday Wishbook.

I have very vivid memories of thumbing through that thick volume of catagloged gift ideas. As a kid, you usually got a few pages in the front of the book, which were, I guess, Sears’s best

See VIEWPOINT, page A10 VIEWPOINT

From page A4

best guesses as to what the hot big ticket gift item was going to be that year, like Star Wars merchandise or Cabbage Patch Kids or whatever.

But once you got past that, you had to thumb through all of the grown-up stuff like perfume and cookware and home decor until you got to the back — to the “TOYS” section!

They always managed to set up the toys in a fun dirama- style way that made even the most mundane toy look like it would yield hours of fun for everyone.

Those kids in the catalog (all decked out in their Underoos or My Little Pony sleepwear) looked like they were having the time of their lives sliding their little cake tins into their new E-Z-Bake Ovens or pushing little pegs into their new Lite-Brite on Christmas morning. Who would ever believe you could bake a cake using only the power of a 100 watt lightbulb?

And so my two younger sisters and I would each take a turn with the Wishbook, going page-to-page and circling all the things we wanted Santa to bring us. Now, we knew that it wasn’t all just going to magically show up under the Christmas tree. Maybe we did at one point, but we definitely figured out something was up when one year we heard my Mom on the telephone in the back bedroom, even with the door closed, we could make out the muffled calls of catalog numbers and letters… “Okay, next is 2100007JF9. Now 214189RP7G.”

And I guess my parents ppreciated the nice aesthetics of the Wishbook as well, because instead of a bunch of wrapped boxes on Christmas morning, we’d walk into the living room to see everything that Santa bought — I mean “brought” — all laid out around the room diorama style for us to take in and be in awe of before hitting all the new stuff hard and heavy in a holiday frenzy — ort maybe they were just saving time and money by not wrapping everything, but in my mind’s eye it was the holiday wonder thing.

Sears actually stopped publishing the Wishbook back in 2011, although by then, the whole online shopping thing had pretty much killed off catalogbased shopping. I was, however, pleasantly surprised to get, in the mail, an Amazon Wishbook, done in the same style of the vintage Sears catalogs. No, I just need to grab my magic market…