Redartz: Greetings and salutations! And before you say anything, I know it's not quite Halloween yet and here we are referencing Christmas. Well, if you remember back to our collective youth, the yearly tradition of Catalog browsing started about this time each year. At our house, late October meant watching the mail for the arrival of those huge volumes of toyland dreams. Montgomery Wards, Sears, J.C. Penneys; all three were regular residents of our coffee table for the last three months of the year.
My brother, sister and I would spend hours trading off one catalog for another, poring over pages of books, toys, games, race cars, record players, and just about everything else. The Christmas catalogs were a perfect means to put together that list for Santa, or later on, that want list for parents and relatives. Actually, the ritual of catalog browsing became a greatly-anticipated part of the whole holiday scenario.
And aside from the obvious attraction of the toys, sometimes the catalogs offered other enticements. I still fondly remember a couple of years when the Sears catalog was full of Dennis the Menace cartoons; making the Christmas dreaming even more fun...
For those interested, here's a great website for looking over those vintage catalogs. Many years represented, and you can leaf from page to page just like we used to...
http://www.wishbookweb.com/the-catalogs/
And now, here's some images to prime your memories. Enjoy, and then we can compare our 'want lists'...
