One of my favorite parts about the extended Christmas season is all the catalogs that arrive only once a year. The rest of the year I get annoyed when I receive paper catalogs (I usually buy what I want to online instead of from a catalog), but during the Mondo American Christmas Season I love to see the excess—and just plain weirdness—that comes in catalogs.
As a kid, the zillion-page Sears Wish Book catalog was the true kick-off to the Christmas season. I could, and will, write an entire post about the Sears Wish Book later, because it was formative for me. But I still get that kind of breathless “what if the perfect toy is on the next page, the toy that will MAKE MY LIFE COMPLETE??” feeling, even when I know the catalog only sells adult clothing. Just pulling catalogs out of the mailbox makes me happy.
Note: I just moved from NYC to Michigan, and I doubt my catalogs will catch up with me this year. This makes me sad. Fortunately, I live close enough to my mom now that I’ll be able to scrutinize all the catalogs she gets, which are the same ones I get PLUS a whole batch targeted at women 30 years older than I am. I can’t wait.
I love the foofy catalogs like Pottery Barn and Lands End and Garnet Hill that show the idealized Mondo American Christmas, the Christmas in which one heterosexual spouse surprises the other heterosexual spouse with a new car, complete with that enormous bow that must weigh 150 pounds, easy. I also love the doofy catalogs like Wireless and Lillian Vernon that just contain dorky things, like an assortment of bow ties to affix to champagne bottles when you give them as gifts, or board games based on walleye fishing. Now that my kids aren’t super-little anymore I even love the kids’ catalogs and the way they make you feel like there’s a chance your kids will actually stay clean during an entire holiday meal with extended family or that they’ll be excited to wear something featuring a scratchy bow.
But what I really love is turning the page of a catalog that contains one kind of merchandise to find a section I never thought would be in the catalog. Last year, on October 19, I was looking in the Olde Tyme Candy section of the Vermont Country Store catalog, turned the page, and there they were: (lower your voice) vibrators.
Yes, vibrators. In the middle of the Vermont Country Store catalog, along with horehound candy and that buzzy bee game and thermal socks.
And that is what Christmas catalogs mean to me.
Written by Magda (Christmased.com‘s Head Elf), who has never purchased anything from the Vermont Country Store catalog, but who has her eye on the buzzy bee game.
You’re right that the funniest thing about the Vermont Country Store catalog is the juxtaposition of unlikely things. You’d be likely to find vibrators right next to some clever yankee invention to deice your windshield wipers. Hey, winters are long in Vermont.
Well, I hope that click through doesn’t show up on my FB timeline! LMAO
They’re a pragmatic people, those Vermonters. I think Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me did something on the Vermont Country Store and the vibrators.
From Lyman Orton’s blog:
“The culture around aging needs to change and we aim to help do something about it. If, along the way, we bump into taboo subjects that make some uncomfortable, we will take them on in our characteristic no-nonsense, practical Vermont way.”
That seriously made me LOL. (And I also thought for a split-second about whether or not it would show up on a FB Timeline … which seriously sucks, imo.)
The Pottery Barn Kids Holiday catalogue is one I look forward to looking through every year. And with a little extra spending money having come my way this month, I get to BUY a couple things this year … woo hoo!!
I was reading along thinking “I cannot WAIT to tell everybody about the marital aid section of the Vermont County Store Catalog!” and there it was. Making this discovery stranger for me is that I found out they sold those now when I was at my in-law’s house, staying the night for my MIL’s funeral, and grabbed it out of her magazine rack.
I always look forward to catalogs like Sundance, where beautiful people lounge on insanely expensive furniture in insanely beautiful rooms that are clearly never entered by small humans with sticky hands.
I do love the catalogs too, and apparently have really been missing out on the Vermont Country Store!