Christmas is days away and I am sure that by now most youngsters have Googled their gift choices, sent Santa a text or a private message and he has placed their order online. I am not a grumpy old man and I will be the first to admit that online shopping is a beautiful thing. But long before Amazon, eBay and the World Wide Web, there was a different type of online shopping. It was done using a rotary-dial telephone and the search engine was the Sears Wish Book.
The Sears Wish book arrived in the mail each September and gave kids across the country three whole months to dream and drool over all of the merchandise featured in the catalog. Just about every toy made in America was in the book and every major toy manufacturer, along with the Sears line, was represented. From G.I. Joe and Captain Action to Barbie and Skipper, the Lost In Space robot to Talky Teachy Keen, the Easy Bake Oven to Lionel trains, everything a kid could possibly want was packed into the five hundred or so pages of the Sears Wish Book. There were also bicycles, musical instruments, mini-bikes, BB guns, go-karts, doll houses, record players, slot-car sets, kitchen sets, electric sports games, molded plastic play sets of army men, farms, cowboys and Indians, Erector sets, outdoor equipment and sporting goods. The Sears Wish Book had it all. My cousins and I would spend hours looking through the catalog and pointing out what we hoped to see under the tree on Christmas Morning.
You would leave the Wish Book around the house as a not-so-subtle reminder to your parents, opened at the page of something you could not possibly live without and placed at strategic locations such as next to your empty cereal bowl on the kitchen table, your father’s workbench or your mother’s make-up vanity.
The Wish Book wasn’t just good for the holiday season, either. It could be ordered out of until the following July, which was not long before the new catalog showed up in the mailbox. You would call in your order and the merchandise and pick it up the next day at the store or your local Sears Pick-Up Center. That was how online shopping worked back then.
There was no limit as to what Sears sold. A girl who lived up the street from me had a roller coaster in her back yard, along with a four-seat Ferris wheel powered by a Briggs and Stratton engine. Both came from Sears and were available in the catalog.
Growing up, I built a lot of plastic models. You could always tell a plastic model under the Christmas tree because when you shook it, the unmistakable sound of the parts inside the box gave it away. Model cars were easy to figure out because of the size and shape of the box. The only mystery was whether it might be the Batmobile or a Chrysler Imperial. When I was ten years old, something happened that I would not go so far as to say traumatized me, but it definitely left a lifelong impression on me. There was one package under the tree that was definitely a plastic model, but the box was large and flat. I couldn’t figure out what it possibly could be. One day after school, as I gazed at the large flat box under the tree, curiosity and temptation got the best of me and I decided to take a peek. I carefully unwrapped one end of the box, peeled back the wrapping paper and saw that it was a model of the USS Constitution, also known as Old Ironsides. I folded the wrapping paper back into place, re-attached the tape and put the box back under the tree. For the rest of the Christmas season, I felt guilty every time I looked at the package. When I opened it on Christmas morning there was no surprise or joy because I already knew what it was. I eventually started putting the model together but didn’t finish it and never again peeked at another present in my life.
A couple of years later we spent Christmas with our family in Dallas. It was a large gathering and due to the fact that we were all at my aunt and uncle’s house on Christmas Eve and would all be at various family members houses around the city on Christmas Morning, it was decided that we would open gifts that night. It was a lot of fun and my cousins and I were all too eager to open our presents early. But when we woke up Christmas Morning and walked into the living room, there were no unopened gifts under the tree, no surprises and no Christmas Morning joy. That experience also left an indelible mark on my young psyche. From then on I have always been a firm believer in opening your gifts on Christmas Morning and not Christmas Eve.
My parents bought an artificial tree one year, the aluminum kind with silver foil branches, red, blue and green ornaments and a revolving color wheel. We only used it once or twice and then it was relegated to the attic. Years later, I decided that it might be kind of fun to put it up and asked my mother if it was still up in the attic. “Oh, sweetie,” she said, “you can go up there and look, but I’m pretty sure we threw that thing away when we moved.” Sure enough, it was nowhere to be found. Not long after, I was watching Antiques Road Show and a woman had one along with the color wheel, which was still operational. The tree and color wheel’s value was estimated at $2,500. I told a friend at work who collected Fifties and Sixties antiques and she said, “Oh, yes. Those trees are highly coveted now, especially if the color wheel works.”
Like the aluminum tree and the color wheel, the Sears Wish Book is long gone now. The catalog was last published in 2011. There are only twenty-six Sears stores left in America and two in Puerto Rico. I read recently that 2021 could finally be the last Christmas shopping season for the one-time retail titan. But in the hearts and minds of Boomers everywhere, the memories of the Wish Book, the dreams contained in its pages and those magical Christmases of long ago are there. They always will be.