Cult of Jef

I have a vivid mem­ory of sit­ting on the porch steps of our home at 434 Bel­laire Drive in Waco, Texas–I must have been five years old–and the post­man placed a heavy book in my hands that was wrapped in a brown wrap­per. Even though I couldn’t read yet, I rec­og­nized the name on the wrap­per: Sears. I tore the wrap­per off and began my love affair with the Christ­mas Wishbook.

Sears wasn’t the only wish­book we received. In fact, Mont­gomery Ward actu­ally coined the term before Sears, and J.C. Pen­ney fol­lowed later. And every Sep­tem­ber we received thick paper cat­a­logs from all three retail­ers, because my mother ordered items from them. Usu­ally, they weren’t sexy things–clothes, drapes, coats, etc.–but the Christ­mas cat­a­logs were dif­fer­ent, because they were filled with happy chil­dren play­ing with page after glossy page of every toy adver­tised on tele­vi­sion and even those that weren’t. In short, it was toy porn.

I must have sat on the porch for hours turn­ing page after page and find­ing more items by the designer names that I were famil­iar with at the time: Fisher Price, Mat­tel, Has­bro, Playskool, etc. I would pore over the pages to make my Christ­mas wish list for Santa Claus, and I can still remem­ber some of my thoughts as clear as a win­ter night even to this day.

If I ask for a snow cone machine, I can start my own busi­ness and sell snow cones to the neigh­bor­hood kids to earn money to buy a car.

If I ask for the Aqua­man doll, I’ll need Super­man, Bat­man, and Won­der Woman, too. After all, I can’t just have one of the Super Friends.

If I ask for a Bat­man cos­tume, I could fight crime in the neighborhood.

In the end, I usu­ally made do with what­ever Santa brought me and my rel­a­tives gave me.

As I grew older and learned to write, I began com­pil­ing elab­o­rate Christ­mas lists with com­par­a­tive columns.

“What does this mean?” Aunt Bar­bara asked, point­ing at the third row.

“It’s the row for the Ghost Gun,” I said. “If you look at the head­ings of the columns, you’ll see that I’ve listed the adver­tised prices for all of the major retail­ers, includ­ing page num­bers in the cat­a­logs. The red cir­cle indi­cates the best price, which, in this instance, is K-Mart, but if K-Mart is sold out, you can still find it in the Mont­gomery Ward’s cat­a­log for just a dol­lar more.”

My aunt stared at me a moment. “What if I make this easy on both of us and just fetch a ten dol­lar bill from my purse?”

Even­tu­ally, rel­a­tives would call my mother each week for my lat­est update after check­ing the weekly cir­cu­lars in the newspaper.

“Nope, Sears is out,” my mother said. “This week J.C. Pen­ney is the way to go for the Fisher Price Lit­tle Peo­ple Castle.”

When I became a teenager, I quit con­sult­ing the Christ­mas wish­books. Rel­a­tives sur­prised me with British Ster­ling cologne, Rubik’s Cube, and the newest Pat Benatar album.

By the time I moved away for col­lege, gift cards became the Christ­mas cur­rency. Then I moved to Atlanta, and my mother called me to get my fax num­ber to send her the family’s Christ­mas lists. “Do I need to include a cover page?” A year or two later, she began e-mailing me the Christ­mas lists.

Once online shop­ping had put most of the cat­a­log com­pa­nies out of busi­ness, my Christ­mas list returned, albeit as a Microsoft Word doc­u­ment. I’d paste an image of the item, along with a descrip­tion, and a hyper­link to the retailer with the low­est price. My mother loved it. “I just click with the mouse, give them my credit card num­ber, and then it arrives as the house a few days later.”

A few years ago, I decided at the last minute to buy a par­tic­u­lar CD for a friend. I had assumed that I could run out some­where local and buy the CD, only to dis­cover that all the mom-and-pop CD stores had gone out of busi­ness. Much to my cha­grin, even the box stores had cut back on the music selec­tion they offered. There was no way to pur­chase the CD locally; it could only be ordered online. What had the world come to? Buy­ing presents and retail had changed so much since I was a kid, and I was no longer sure that I liked it.

My niece no longer types her Christ­mas wish list and e-mails it to the rest of the fam­ily. Instead, she cre­ates as Wish List on Amazon.com. “Has she updated her Wish List yet?” I asked my sister.

“Not yet,” Vicki said. “She swears that she’s going to do it this weekend.”

I paused.  In that moment, I just wanted a sim­ple answer, so that I could buy a present and scratch my niece’s name off my list.  I found myself in my Aunt Barbara’s shoes 35 years ago, look­ing a tow-headed boy with a rudi­men­tary flip chart.  “What if I make it easy on all of us and just send her two twenty dol­lar bills?”