Unsung Sears Wish Book a ghost of Christmas past
The first Sears Christmas Book, in 1933, was a modest 87 pages. It offered fruitcakes and Mickey Mouse watches and live canaries. By 1968, the catalog had ballooned to 608 pages and sold quilted robes and copper fondue pots and Electric Football games. That year, Sears retitled it the Wish Book, which was what Americans had been calling it for decades. Wish Book was the perfect name: From 1933 until 1993 — when Sears announced it would no longer publish its Christmas ham-sized monoliths (then continued to dabble, in fits and starts) — the Wish Book was so central to holiday expectations it read like a catalog of middle-class American aspiration.
To flip through one today is to see what we thought our homes and holidays should look like. Indeed, for many kids, the arrival of the annual Wish Book was nothing less than the unofficial herald of the holiday season. We like to grumble that Christmas comes earlier every year, but the Wish Book would appear in late summer, just as school was returning; which meant,
by Thanksgiving, the catalog was dogeared and mangled, its pages circled and scissored out, to act as helpful illustrations for wish lists to Santa. You had months to wish. About a year ago, Rob Gerlach, a division vice president for Hoffman Estate, Ill.based Sears Holdings, began picking through the company’s archives, assembling an in-house showcase of this history, to remind employees of the struggling retailer how deeply its roots once reached. When he came to the Wish Books, he was flooded with memories. “For myself, I look
through our Christmas catalogs from the ’70s and I’m remembering my dad and good times with brothers and sisters. And Christmas itself. It’s not about recognizing a G.I. Joe (on a Wish Book page). It’s about the emotion the image evokes.
“These catalogs, I see now, were part of what we thought was possible.”
Under our Christmas trees, and long after the tinsel was swept away.
So several weeks ago when Sears announced its
first Wish Book in ages, I eagerly awaited my copy, expecting a few hours of shameless nostalgia and consumerist dreaming. Then I got a copy and flipped through its thin 120 pages, and a few minutes later, I set it aside. Of course, I am no longer 11 years old, and my mailbox is stuffed with catalogs I never asked for. But toys, once the heart of a Wish Book, filled just six pages. Tools and tool cases — a section I once sped past — got a dozen. What once had the informational density of a phone book, now appeared airy and anemic. This new Wish Book was no more extraordinary, overwhelming or magical than an ad circular.
Understand, there was a time when I would call Sears every day for weeks, asking whoever happened to pick up the phone when the new Wish Book would arrive.
“Try tomorrow,” they said.
I tried tomorrow, then the tomorrow after that. Once, the person on the other end said he would find out when the Wish Book was arriving. He put down the phone and I could hear him telling someone I called every day, what a pain I was, etc. When he picked up a moment later, I said I heard him. He said Santa would be leaving coal if I called again.
I called again. The day the Wish Book arrived, my mother would drive me to Sears. As she shopped, I would plop onto a couch in the shoe department and study section after section. It was reality TV before reality TV, a kind of window into other people’s rumpus rooms, what they wore to bed and what hobbies they pretended to enjoy. There were chapters on wrenches and telescopes, on air hockey and grandfather clocks; there were “Star Wars” action figures I never saw in actual stores, and screenshots of video games that I would never see again and images of disturbingly cooperative families playing board games.
It was never a catalog of reality.
At best it was a preview of future yard sales.
But this new Wish Book? A window into the cultural irrelevance of Sears, less a warm retro hug than a slender reminder of the decline of American middle-class expectations.
“I applaud the return of the Sears Wish Book, but look, it’s probably an insurmountable challenge to try to return the Wish Book to the kind of cultural importance that it once enjoyed with families,” said Jason Liebig, creator of Wishbook Web, a vast online archive of old holiday catalogs. “I mean, that America doesn’t really exist these days.”