A seasonal snippet from the Storyworth project.
Catalog Shopping
Santa brought my younger sister a rabbit for Christmas once – she named him Peter. I don’t know what happened to Peter after the excitement of Christmas morning was over but I still have the transistor radio he brought to me that year.
Christmas in our house was announced with arrival of the seasonal catalogs – pages and pages of dreams just waiting to come true lay between the glossy covers of publications the size of phone books. The toy section was holiday central for us kids. We spent hours drooling over extravagant offerings – talking dolls, dumping trucks, miniature kitchens, six-shooters in holsters and electric trains. We’d circle items with black crayons and then fall into dreams the catalogs designed especially for us.
Mom and Dad did their best to make those dreams come true but funds only stretched so far. Our stockings were usually filled with things like new socks and underpants, shampoo and toothpaste and a new coloring book and crayons. One year my brother got a jar of Cheez Wiz in his – us girls thought he was the luckiest, we all loved Cheez Wiz. There was always a Christmas orange in the toe of the stocking.
Santa never wrapped his presents – they sat beside our stockings and teased us until we’d reached the orange and could dive into the magic our dreams had conjured.
There were always lots of presents beneath the tree – beautifully wrapped gifts that had been delivered to the front door in large cardboard boxes addressed to Mom. They came from relatives and friends from across the country and arrived weeks before Christmas did. Mom was in charge of making sure the presents stayed wrapped until Christmas morning.
We could count on Mom’s friend, Auntie Gladys, to have knitted us a new sweater every year and on Dad’s company to send a game – the bosses also sent Laura Secord candies (we liked those more than the Chinese checkers we got and didn’t know how to play).
The excitement of Christmas lasted until somebody invariably ended up crying because we’d all gotten up before the crack of dawn. Dad would send us back to bed to have an impossible nap while Mom gathered the wrapping paper and her thoughts and stuffed the bird for dinner before the cousins arrived and the real merriment began.
The wait between Christmases was always too long, thankfully we all had birthdays we could look forward to before the next catalogs arrived.