The Silky Johnson bathrobe for Christmas? This isn’t the one I wanted in the catalog!

So, has your season been everything that ‘Every Kiss Begins With Kay’ promised to deliver? Maybe not. Perhaps your Christmas spirit is a bit of a vagrant soul, and it drifts between relishing the last third of ‘A Christmas Story’ and the cathartic release found with watching Bill Hader as Al Pacino as Charlie Brown at Christmas. That’s kind of my sentiment on the holidays, and I suspect that I am not the only one sitting on the family couch with this back-and-forth happening in my head.

What if we had a time machine? Wouldn’t you love to go and see if the adults living 55 years ago felt the same way about Christmas that we do? After all, being a grown-up in 2014 is kinda tough, and I’d love to know if life really was much simpler.

  Guess what? Thanks to my family’s accidental treasury of magazines, we suddenly can!

Behold the 1959 Sears Christmas catalog. It was discovered by my brother-in-law while we were cleaning up after another Mashpee Christmas at my mom’s festive home. The catalog had us rapt as we paged through the various keepsakes on offer, and we marveled at how much things have changed. I took a few snapshots with my phone because I thought they deserved a wider audience. I hope you enjoy the wares as you recover from family time and glare sideways at your unwrapped jewelery case gift holding a sparkly new Open Hearts necklace…

Just imagine how thrilled your dinner guests will be when a  Trader Joe’s frozen meal is placed on this artful tableau. The woman pictured is so pleased with the tray itself, my guess is that you don’t need to server her a damn thing. Don’t even bother to show her your new television– she is already won over.

At last! A (pretty pink) rotary phone that is also a clock radio small enough for any bedside table. All yours for $60 bucks! Wait. What?

As my thirteen year old niece described it, “it looks like he is brushing his hair with a measuring cup.” My guess is that this is a Clarisonic prototype being used improperly. Looks like someone didn’t read the instruction manual.

I’m not sure which child originally owned this catalog- but whoever it was clearly could not decide what kind of a life she was aiming to lead. I’m sorry, but you can’t be completely neutral when given the choice between the Dickensian partygoer, a virginal bride and the nun. If you read the fine print, you’ll see that the nun does not come with a wig…so she can never leave the abbey. $1.69 says that Sears Roebuck still has all of the nuns in stock.

Want a creepy mask that will scar your children for the rest of their lives? Boom.

“Husbands, do we have the gift that will keep on giving! Our slippers will keep your wife in ecstasy while you jet away on your Mad Men trips to Palm Springs.”

“What’s a boudoir?” asked my niece when we turned to this page.  The answer, clearly, is that it’s a place where you don risqué outfits that bare your forearms. I told her to start taking mental notes accordingly. Her great aunt (my aunt) told her earlier in the day that she better get on the pill. Again, those 1950s were simpler times.

“Donning these bathrobes = happy family!”

Someone do me a favor and leave me a comment if they know what is actually going on with this bag. Do you stick your head in the bag and smoke upside-down? Or do you have a pet mouse that lives in the bag and has a severe nicotine habit?  The possibilities are endless.

Paging through this massive book, I wondered aloud if there were only white people in 1959. It’s a rhetorical question but where the heck is the diversity?  Then I turned to a page and found one doll of color.  One poor doll. Jeez.  They might have been short on inclusiveness, but they sure were long on terrible gifts for your (white) man. Let’s continue:

I call it, “The Extreme V”– pointing to the party in his…socks.

The trendy man wrap is only $1.97…and it comes with a pocket to hold your comb! I think they still sells these at Vineyard Vines for 300% of the 1959 price.

Okay that’s about it. If the hour had not been so late, and I had sipped a bit less wine, I probably would have spent more time sifting through this fine publication and capturing other unforgettable Christmas gifts. Instead I just gave my family a bunch of farewell hugs and was thankful that we could be together for another holiday. As nice as all of these presents might (or might not) be, nothing takes the place of having people around you to torment, laugh at, laugh with, or just share a knowing glance when holiday decorum fall off the proverbial metal folding tray.

When your family actually nails their gift giving…

At the end of the day, I suspect that in another 55 years, humans will look back on the crap that we bought one other and wonder what the heck we were smoking in our leather bags with pipes protruding out from the corner.  After all, the Jesus Shaves mug was one of this year’s hits, and I’m willing to bet that it is indeed on sale in the 2014 Sears Christmas Catalog. That is, if they still print them. Somebody grab a copy and bury it in the bottom of your cedar closet! We’ll be back for a revisit in a few years.

Love, laughter and crappy gifts to you all.  And don’t be giving me any of that stuff at next year’s White Elephant party.