I am fully on board with the chocolate and ribbon candy idea myself. There’s not much we need and I know we are truly blessed to be able to say that. Last year, our Lions Club volunteered at the Salvation Army Christmas Angel Tree booth at the Gateway Mall, sorting presents dropped off by kind-hearted folks who were helping make Christmas a little brighter for kids and families in need. During quiet times, I’d wander over to look at the remaining cards on the trees, listing the first names and ages of the children and the item or two they were hoping Santa might bring them. Mike and I picked a few names off the tree at the end of our shift and spent the next hour combing the Target and Walmart toy aisles, reliving a little piece of our youth while basking in the warm glow of getting to do something kind for someone else.
I think back to how long my Santa wish list was as a child, and the amount of time my sister and I spent flipping through the Sears and JCPenney’s Christmas catalogs, heavy as bricks but more precious than gold to us when they showed up in the mail each year. We’d skip past the boring clothes and furniture sections and go right for the toys, bending page corners, circling our favorites, writing down names of all the dolls and games we couldn’t live without, and debating whether the Easy Bake Oven or the Snoopy Snow Cone Maker should be on my list or hers.
I found a website that has full-color copies of those Christmas catalogs, dating back to 1940. You can browse through each one and see what were featured items for that year’s holiday. The 1941 Sears Christmas catalog has 161 pages. By 1979, it clocks in at 672 pages, a lot of potential gift ideas to flip through. Mix in 574 pages of the JCPenney catalog and 496 pages from Montgomery Wards, and it starts to feel overwhelming.
I clicked through a few pages from 1979: a computerized chess board for $277, a pocket-sized language translator for $169, a digital watch for $89, and probably most shocking to me, a 46-pound VHS recorder for $1188. Back then, we could never have imagined those items and so much more all contained in the smartphones we use each day.
As kids, my sister and I didn’t think about the prices of the items we put on our Christmas wish list. Maybe we imagined Santa’s workshop employed elves who worked for free so our gifts didn’t really cost the prices listed on the catalog pages. Santa never left a letter by the cookie plate asking us to take it down a notch next year. There were no guidelines to Christmas dreaming, but we also understood it didn’t mean we were getting everything we wrote down on our list or even half of it. Santa had a practical side too, so there would be socks, sweaters, and mittens mixed in with the toys under the tree, along with a couple of pairs of slightly too-small pajamas from grandparents who hadn’t seen us in a while.
As an adult, I now see the gifts we truly got each year could never be found in a holiday catalog or written down on a Christmas wish list: a safe neighborhood filled with lots of kids to play with, a cozy home with our own bedrooms, warm clothes to wear, plenty of healthy food to eat, good books to read, and two wonderful parents who loved and cared for us every day.