A Christmas Story I Told My Kids This Week

Once upon a time, a long time ago, before the Internet, there were things called "catalogs." There were three amazing stores that sometimes sent these "catalogs" to people's home, named JC Penney, Sears/Roebuck, and Montgomery/Wards (aka. Monkey Wards). When I was a little girl, these "catalogs" had special editions known as "Christmas catalogs" that were filled with wonders. My sisters and I would sit and stare at the pages and pages of everything from matching robe and pajama sets to sparkly holiday dresses to canopy beds to spiral staircases to Easy Bake Ovens to train sets to outdoor pools to indoor pool tables, and our heads were NOT filled with sugar plums, but rather with unabated covetous consumerist hunger. We WANTED these things, in fact, were were pretty sure that we needed a lot of them. We would circle the pictures, and make stars by the truly awesome stuff, and show our mom, and show our mom, and show our mom. Usually, at some point or other, she would say something about "choices" or "limits" or possibly "self-restraint" (when we got old enough to understand that, sort of). At some point, we'd make a list, and it wouldn't usually include everything we'd circled... usually. And we knew that, come Christmas morning, not everything we circled would be there, under the tree, or on the chair, or the couch. But we hoped; deep down, we hoped.