The ‘Amazon Kids Gift Book:  Share the Joy’ showed up in the mail last week.  That is the equivalent of the Montgomery Ward Christmas Catalog when we were kids.  That was the most popular book of the year.  It arrived in the mailbox in October and the dreaming began.  I immediately noticed some differences between our version and the current imposter…size and content.

The new version is merely a toy pamphlet compared to the old catalog.  I was a scrawny kid and hefting the catalog took some effort.  First thing one had to do was find the toy section and again that took some effort.  You had to get through clothing, men’s and women’s, house goods, yard tools, shoes, and even underwear.  Once you found the toy section it was duly marked and then flipping the pages slowed down considerably.  This current pamphlet is nothing but toys.  No effort required at all.

The rule in the Thorpe household was, “You can ask Santa for one thing and the rest will be up to him.”  Wow, one thing out of all these pages.  We were familiar with the ads on Saturday morning cartoons, so we had an idea of where we were headed but this was going to take some time.  This was real life prioritizing and very serious business.  We knew Grandma and Grandpa’s stories about getting an orange and a few nuts in their sock.  So, we knew we were lucky to get to pick one thing out of the catalog.  It took weeks to figure out what that one thing would be.  It’s a good thing we started in October.

Well, back to this year’s version. There are no Lincoln Logs or Tinker Toys, but there are Magna-Tiles and Legos, with no prices noted.  Tiny Tears and Chatty Cathy have been replaced with American Girls and Anime Heroes with spikey hair and intense eyes.  There are cameras, STEM sets, headphones, video games and consoles.  One welcome sight which has withstood the test of time is the Barbie page.  She still has her skinny waist and perfect face and hair. Evidently, the campaign to make her more real has succumbed to marketing and Ken is right there with her, but now his jacket is pink and again, no prices noted.  There are some random pages which identify items as ‘Under $100’ or ‘Under $10’.  How are these kids supposed to learn finances?

I’m all for progress, but I yearn for the good, old catalog, just like my grandparents wished for an orange and a few nuts.   And for the record, their generation not only looked at each page of their catalog, they used each page in a very practical way!  Catalogs made Life Good for them.  They made Life Good for me.  We can only hope this ‘imposter’ can make Life Good for our grands.  It’s a changing world!