Tag: Christmas memories

Memory Lane: Sears-Roebuck Christmas Catalogue

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Here! Enjoy seven minutes’ worth of toys in the Sears-Roebuck 1960 Christmas catalog.

Oh, did I love those catalogs! I know it’s not quite what Christmas is about, and you can go too far–(Are you kidding? You can go way too far!) but come on, let’s get real: who doesn’t like to receive presents? Some of us like to give them, too.

I loved the “play sets” with mobs of little plastic figurines. Can I remember all the play sets that I had? Circus (I was, I think, five years old). Farm. Dinosaurs and Cavemen. African Safari. Cape Canaveral. Military Base (with spring-powered missiles!). The kid down the block had the Ben Hur set.

And then there were all the different construction sets with which you could design and build your own architectural fantasies. There was just no end to it. Sitting on the couch in the sitting room, watching the snow come down, and thumbing through the toys section in the catalog–was there ever a more pleasant way to spend a winter’s day?

Alas, there is no more Sears-Roebuck & Co., no more Sears Christmas Catalog.

Just memories.

[P.S.–That’s Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring in the background.]

Memory Lane: The Sears & Roebuck Catalog

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Vintage 1966 Sears Christmas Wishbook / Catalog PDF Digital - Etsy

When I was a wee tot, among my favorite features of the Christmas season was the Sears & Roebuck catalog. The example above is from 1966; but for me the heyday was circa 1955-1960. Them were the days!

How I loved those Sears play sets! My favorite Christmas presents–the circus, a farm, an African safari, a world of dinosaurs, Cape Canaveral (with spring-loaded rockets that really worked!): and those were just the ones I had. Too bad I never got the Ben-Hur play set: could’ve had chariot races with dinosaurs.

Oh–and I had pirates, too. Complete with ship and tiny cannon that fired microscopic cannon-balls that instantly got lost.

Ten years old, nasty weather outside–but what did I care, I had the Sears catalog! Realistic toy guns. Model airplanes. Chemistry sets (can you say “kaboom!”?). And once my brother had the girder and panel construction set, we were off to the races! We liked to make up adventures and act them out with our toys. That’s how you wind up with cavemen running NASA.

Anybody out there up for a game of cowboys and dinosaurs?

‘Away in a Manger’ (American Melody)

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Away in a Manger will always be among my oldest Christmas memories. I was little more than a baby myself when I learned to sing it. And it was to this melody, the American melody–sung here by Alan Jackson–who better?

I’m not so sick that this hymn can’t move me to tears.

Memory Lane: The Sears Christmas Catalog

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1959 Sears Christmas Book | Christmas books, Christmas catalogs, Vintage christmas

What kid growing up in the 50s or 60s didn’t love this–the annual Sears, Roebuck Christmas catalog?

I spent hours and hours with these. I mean, come on–what’s better than a day off from school because it’s snowing too hard, curled up on the sitting room couch with the Sears catalog?

Everything was in there! Even guns. But my favorite was the section devoted to assorted play sets–the farm, Cape Canaveral, the circus, dinosaurs, Wild West: wow, they had everything!

Animal World Farm Playset (12 Medium size animals in a bag) - Curious Kids

I do wish I still had some of those rubber-nosed rockets and spring-powered launchers from the Cape Canaveral play set. I still have farm animals, circus animals, and jungle animals–and dinosaurs, of course–from other sets. Reminders of sweet Christmas Past. Priceless now.

It’s been many years since I’ve seen a Sears Christmas catalog. Do they still publish them?

But my box of animals is still here, to bring to mind the people that I loved, and family Christmas at my grandpa’s house, and early, early Christmas morning, and my first sight of the decorated tree, the job my father did after he packed his kids off to sleep…

A Truly Unexpected Gift

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This Christmas, give the gift of plaster teeth!

I once did this. The dentist next door threw out a load of unusual-looking boxes, and it made me curious. The boxes contained plaster models of various patients’ teeth. I knew a lot of the people whose choppers were represented there.

This was too good to pass up. I scooped up a lot of them and gift-wrapped them as gifts for my family at the family Christmas Eve party at my aunts’ house. Everyone was going to be there! And everyone was going to get a nice little set of plaster teeth, probably reflecting the dental state of someone that they knew.

I relished the raised eyebrows as I handed out the gift boxes. Like they would ever guess what was inside! Like my sister would have any idea what to do with a model of Wayne So-and-so’s teeth, who once upon a time lived next door to us.

Oh, the puzzled looks! Puzzled? Try dumbfounded! Oh, the bewildered silence! And finally, the payoff–a whole room full of laughter and merriment. Years later, you could still get a chuckle out of anybody, just by mentioning the incident. Although I very much doubt that anyone who received a set of somebody else’s teeth kept it.

The gag didn’t cost anyone a red cent, but just try buying that much laughter.

A Christmas Memory

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This, one of my very earliest memories, came rushing back to me this morning as I drove to the Woodbridge Mall.

I was a little tiny boy, cuddled up on the couch with my Uncle Bernie, in my Grammy’s living room, complete with Christmas tree, and with It Came Upon a Midnight Clear playing somewhere in the background, probably on the radio; and Bernie was reading to me from a book of Christmas stories. When he finished, he turned on the TV set and we watched A Christmas Carol–the old one, with Reginald Owen as Scrooge–on the tiny black-and-white screen. I was too young to understand the movie, although my uncle did help me to see it was a story about a bad man who changed, and became good. I do remember Scrooge in his nightshirt meeting the Ghost of Christmas Past.

And this memory brings tears to my eyes, because everything about it was just so good, so right: but my uncle and my Grammy, they’ve long since passed on and their house is a place I can’t go to anymore, long for it as I may. And to this day I love A Christmas Carol, and It Came Upon a Midnight Clear. I even remember some of the pictures in the book, of angels singing.

So much beauty, so much blessing. God knew what He was doing when he gave us Christmas.

(Video sung by St. Peter’s Choir)

Memory Lane: Electric Baseball

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My brother and I got this toy for Christmas once, sometime in the Fabulous Fifties: Tudor Electric Baseball.

The ball was a tiny white magnet which you “pitched” with a kind of catapult, aiming for a tin sheet representing the batter. Behind the sheet sat your opponent, who, when he heard the ball stick to the other side of the screen, smacked his side with a spring-operated plastic bat. If the ball landed on a circle marked “hit,” he flicked a switch and these little plastic guys with strips of celluloid on their bases ran around the basepaths, accompanied by a loud buzzing sound as the whole gameboard vibrated energetically. The basepaths were thick cardboard guides. Without them, the runners would have dashed all over the place in a kind of brownian movement.

If this sounds complicated, that’s only because it really was complicated.

Our friend “thewhiterabbit” had an Electric Football game. He soon gave up trying to make any sense of it.

Colorforms Baseball, which we also tried, had no electricity–only a dial on a spinner which, when spun, would stop either on an out or some kind of hit.

I have a feeling this toy cost my parents a fair amount of money. We dutifully played it until the day we somehow lost the ball. It was a very noisy game, and lots of times you’d smack the tin sheet and the ball would just fall off and you’d have to have a do-over. Or sometimes you’d smack it and the ball would just stick there.

But it’s the thought that counts!

A Zany (but Harmless) Prank

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My wife says I should tell you about this, so here goes.

Many years ago, the dentist next door got rid of a whole bunch of plaster dental molds. They were in rather nice cardboard sleeves, each set of choppers labeled as pertaining to a particular patient.

Well, I gave ’em out as Christmas presents to my family.

We were all gathered together at my Grandpa’s house–I don’t know how we all fit in there, every Christmas–and I had one gift-wrapped sleeve of dental molds for each guest. Ours is a small town, so chances were that the molds you received belonged to at least one person you actually knew. My mother, for instance, got a set of Wayne Whatsisname’s dental molds, who used to live around the block from us.

You should’ve seen the look on her face.

Everyone was flabbergasted, no one knew what to say–until my brother started giggling uncontrollably (I forget whose teeth he had), and next thing you know, they were all guffawing. It must have come as a great relief to realize this–er, gift–was just a gag.

Yes, we also gave out real presents. Nobody had to be content with a set of Priscilla So-and-so’s plaster teeth.