It arrived two weeks ago. And yes, even though its focus was on Christmas - still off my radar for three months, at least - it was hardly unwelcome.
I had opened the door in search of the mail, and found it on the mat.
The Sears Christmas Wish Book.
It spoke to Christmases past. More specifically, to Christmases way past. As in: the Christmases of my childhood.
The book usually arrived early, and had me consumed for weeks.
I'd just be immersed in back to school, of course, and sharpening my pencil crayons and admiring my stash of Pink Pearl erasers. But that didn't stop me from curling up in my bedroom every once in a while to admire the offerings on the pages.
Would I wish for an Easy Bake Oven? A Barbie convertible? That little red purse with the sequins on front?
Turned out, however, the catalogue ended up becoming more of a toy than all the toys within it.
The sisters and I found our scissors and our glue and our construction paper and went to work.
I'd find a woman in a winter coat, and decided she'd be the mother. The dad would be snipped from the sweater pages, and the kids from the children's wear. There'd be a baby, always in a high chair, but there'd never be any pets.
I'd snip and paste and create a wish book home where they would live, with bedrooms and kitchens and little cozy dens. They might have had a ping pong table in their garage and a guitar or two in their rec room.
Their dining tables would have the finest china, and their bathrooms, the softest towels. The sewing machine would have all the bells and whistles, as would the coffee maker and the vacuum.
They'd have a TV in every room, unlike any family I'd ever known.
You could do a lot with a wish book. Store-bought cut-out dolls were no match for ones we made ourselves.
The Barbie convertible, which I never did acquire, would have been great fun, no question there. The Easy Bake Oven would have been splendid, until the light bulb expired or the dry ingredients were used up - whichever came first.
But the catalogue was less about those things and more about the pleasure you couldn't find in something that called for batteries or light bulbs.
Long before Christmas ever came, the wish book - or what was left of it - went in the garbage, the bulk of its pages gone.
It didn't cost a penny, that picture-perfect catalogue. But it filled my every wish.
