By: Paul Morrone
One of the very clear memories I have from being a child was getting the Sears Wish Book and the JCPenney Holiday Catalog in the mail in mid-November. They were as thick as a telephone book (over 600 pages according to Google) and had photos of virtually every item the store sold. My sister and I would diligently flip through the pages circling things we wanted to ask Santa for. For over a month, those books resided on our kitchen counter as we waited for Christmas to arrive. That storied tradition is something this generation of children will never be able to comprehend. Sure, we get an Amazon catalog and a few ads from other retailers, but those are barely 20 pages and don’t have near the heft of the wish books from the 1990s. As the old saying goes, they just don’t make ‘em like they used to.
It should come as no surprise, however. I could only begin to imagine what the distribution costs of those catalogs alone would be in today’s world. If it costs $0.73 to mail a standard letter, it would probably be about $10 to mail a 3-pound book. Add in design and printing cost, and I’m sure it makes complete fiscal sense to forgo the catalogs in favor of much cheaper digital ads that we are all bombarded with this time of year.
There is a lost art to some of the things that technology has disrupted, and the nostalgic part of me misses it dearly. Even the Sunday paper (which presumably very few people even get anymore), is a shell of itself. The pre-black Friday edition was always stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey with ads from virtually every store in the state. Kelly and I would spend hours on that Sunday sifting through the various pamphlets in search of the year’s hottest toy. You hated to get that one delivered on a rainy morning…
Picking out Christmas gifts with our kids is just different today. The Sunday ads have been replaced by emails and the holiday catalogs have gone the way of the dodo bird. It’s a mere fact of life and is one of the many things that almost certainly won’t go back to the way it was. For me, I’ll continue to cherish the memory and remember the good ol’ days.
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