This last weekend I was experiencing alittle bit of Christmas whiplash. At one moment I would be very present with myhubby and my kids and then next moment transported back to very fondmemories of Christmases circa the late 1960′s.
A wave of nostalgia swept over me thislast weekend. We had put the finishing touches on the Christmas treeand the boxes that had held decorations were back stowed away. Christmas music was playing from the boombox in the corner of theroom and there was noise, maybe even laughter, coming from anotherroom in the house. I looked over to the living room and my youngestson and daughter were sitting there looking through a toy catalogthat had arrived in the mail.
All of a sudden I had images of sittingon the floor near the fireplace in our living room of my childhood home with my youngerbrothers flipping through the Sear Christmas catalog. Every year agiant catalog that must have been at least one inch thick wouldarrive in the mail. It was glorious. Not only did it have a pictureof every toy that was available that season but it was also loadedwith pictures from all their other departments. This was way beforethe Internet and so to have a book with all the new toys in fulltechnicolor was so much fun. We would circle toys that would go onour Wish Lists and hope that somehow Santa would get the message.
So here it was a few decades later andmy kids were looking through the catalog with the same intense lookson their faces. The only think was that this catalog was muchsmaller than the catalogs of yore and it was a little more modern. They were scouring through the ThinkGeek catalog. Instead of lookingat dolls and toy trucks the catalog they were looking through wasfilled with Robots and T-shirts that featured Internet memes.
Watching my geeky kids sitting therescouring through the catalog made me feel a little bit like JaneJetson looking at Judy and Elroy. And I was right back to Saturdaymorning 1968…..
Read more here: Christmas Whiplash