The Christmas shopping spree seems to start earlier every year. In past years the marketing frenzy began after the Thanksgiving turkey bones were cleared off the table.
This year I was seeing Christmas decorations before Halloween.
One sure way to avoid the consumer crush is to do all of your shopping through mail-order catalogs, and they've been arriving since mid-September. Hardly a day goes by that my mail carrier doesn't lug new "shop-by-mail" opportunities up to our mail slot. The current crop of slick, four-color shopper's suggestions seems spectacular when compared to years past.
On every page, masters of the copywriter's art describe each offering in such seductive verbiage that you're reaching for your plastic credit cards with one hand as you dial the toll-free telephone number with the other.
The Abercrombie & Fitch catalog offered Indiana Jones-type safari clothing and outdoors gear that made Banana Republic look like an outfitter of paupers. Established in 1892, A & F was the supplier chosen for Teddy Roosevelt's historic safaris. But today, who really needs a $500 firearms maintenance kit that's "packed in a hand-crafted briefcase of solid oak with brass combination latches?"
Continuing the pattern of high-priced glossy catalogs that are more coffee-table decorations than serious shopping tools is Neiman Marcus. If only I had the money to outfit my partner, the Lady Marjorie, in $1,100 pumps covered in hand-set Austrian crystals over black satin, $10,000 alligator jeans and a $295,000 Russian lynx coat. But then, where would we go?
The gallon jug of Texas Thunder chili sauce for $13 is the only thing in the catalog I'm able to afford.
The catalog I fondly remember from my youth is the Sears & Roebuck publication. That phonebook-sized tome would arrive at the house around early November and provide interesting reading way past Christmas. In some ways, a Sears catalog could even be more interesting than a J.C. Witney auto parts catalog.
About three-fourths of the way through the catalog you came upon the thick, 30-page-long toy section. (The catalog at our house always seemed to fall open automatically to those pages.) Within those pages was the stuff of dreams.
Once you got through the pages of crib toys and dolls, I remember arriving at the cowboy outfits. Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers each had "official" autographed holster sets, hats and accessories. I mean, how could you be one of Hoppy's little buckaroos without a scarf complete with a cow skull neck-slide?
Back then, the only size model trains available were the big, O-gauge versions manufactured by Lionel and American Flyer. The Sears catalog carried them both, and I remember my little buddy Johnny-from down the block-and I used to argue endlessly over their respective merits.
"I think the American Flyer is more real," he'd say, "because it's only got two tracks-like real trains-and doesn't have that third rail running down the center."
"Oh yeah," I'd counter, "well, my passenger cars don't have those phony silhouettes painted on the windows, and more of my freight cars actually do stuff than yours." I had a log car that dumped when you stopped it over a special piece of track, and a boxcar that unloaded freight at a siding over another special piece of track.
"My steam engine puffs real smoke," Johnny would answer back.
"It does not-you ran out of pills to make it smoke," I'd reply, "and now they don't sell them anymore."
We'd go on and on, pointing out one perceived fault or advantage, and leafing through the Sears catalog at the same time, trying to decide which additional piece of equipment we needed next to one-up the other.
The Lionel did have more accessories, but at the same time, there was that third rail. It's too bad our train sets wouldn't fit together.
My mother, however, was the person who seemed truly addicted to mail order catalogs. She regularly got a catalog from somewhere in Wisconsin that contained more unique paraphernalia than you'd ever find in any store. If she thought an item might be useful in either saving time or a step in anything she did regularly, chances are she already had it.
"Where'd you find these nail-clippers with the finger loops?" I asked one day at my parents' house.
"Your mom found them in one of her 'gadget-of-the-month' catalogs," Pop said, shaking his head. "Who knows what's coming next month."
Whatever it was-if it was judged to be worthwhile-my brother and I weren't too surprised to find duplicates in each of our Christmas stockings the next year. I just wished she'd have gone back to her Sears catalog and sent me a Lionel observation car to go with my streamliner passenger train.
Gary McDaniel, a longtime Magnolia resident, is a freelance writer and columnist. He can be reached via email at mageditor@nwlink.com.[[In-content Ad]]
