There are a number of comforting constants surrounding the Holiday season. Decorations begin to appear in windows. The stress of completing your Christmas shopping and/or Christmas cards mounts. Frosty, Rudolph, the Grinch and George Bailey make their annual TV appearances. The Cubs are already eliminated from next year's Pennant races. There has, however, been at least one major change from the Ghosts of Christmases past:
There's no longer a Christmas Catalog.
Oh, there are still plenty of Christmas catalogs. Every mail order joint in the country floods the mailbox with their glossy magazines, flyers, and even inserts in the Sunday paper. But there's no longer that one big department store Catalog that used to be as regular as the tax forms.
Used to be, sometime around the afternoon of July 5, we'd get a card in our post office box notifying us that we had received a package that was too large for our mailbox. We'd swap the card for a brown wrapped tome roughly the same size as a mid-size city's phone book.
The Christmas Catalog.
This thing was cool because you knew from experience that Santa used this same Catalog. Every year, Mom and Dad would tell my siblings and me to go through the Catalog and "pick out a few things we'd like to have."
Now, at Grandma and Grandpa's, we always got gunky clothes and stuff. Obviously, they didn't use Santa's Catalog. At our house, though, every Christmas morning after Santa's visit, some of the very same items we'd picked would be under the tree. What better proof could we have asked for?
Never occurred to us at the time that our parents were as capable of reading the Catalog as they were of munching down the milk and cookies we'd left out for the jolly old elf.
Regardless of who was using it, this book truly contained something for everybody. From furniture to hardware, baby clothes to beauty supplies, suits and dresses to knick-knacks to carpeting, the Catalog could supply your every material need. The most interesting thing it contained for us kids, however, was toys.
Actually, as I got older, I began to look forward to the lingerie section, but we won't go into that here.
The toys were the thing. Not just games, trucks, dolls and stuff like that, but the big things like electric race sets and trains, plastic army men, and electric football games.
Of course, these looked awesome in the Catalog. What you actually got in your electric train set was just track and the train, not the amazingly photogenic mountain village layout accompanying the set in the Catalog's photo. The electric football game you unwrapped didn't come with the full color action shot of Dick Butkus compressing Fran Tarkenton's vertebrae, either.
This, by the way, was especially true of the cheapo version: The one with the random-directional, solid red and yellow teams playing on a plain green field without the neato paperboard grandstand and movable scoreboard. Remember how you'd turn this sucker on and watch the field quickly turn into an freshly-kicked ant hill of molded plastic men bouncing and vibrating uselessly on their sides while you screamed as your ball carrier rushed for a "gain" of minus 30 yards straight out of bounds?
Sure looked great in the Catalog.
Santa might deliver the dream toy, but the one thing he could never include, other than batteries, was the imagination to make it live up to that advance billing. That was left up to you.
A friend and I invented some rules that led to a few truly epic electric football games. Each quarter lasted two hours real time with the clock running non-stop. That was the only way to run enough plays to come even close to simulating a real game. Thus, our games would last over 8 hours which, given the onslaught of TV commercials in the average NFL game today, was actually a lot closer to reality than we realized!
My Brother and I would spend hours setting up our opposing plastic soldier armies in awesome-looking battle formations. A waste of time unless we figured out a way to launch our mini-wars. Lincoln Log catapults turned out to be a pretty good solution.
Electric race sets looked cool in the Catalog too, but we often spent as much time retrieving the car after a hairpin spin-out as we did in head-to-head racing. So, we staged races long enough to provide time to recover from these mishaps. Then we amassed fleets of cars that we raced in complex tournaments against competing fleets, so that "coaching strategy" became as important and interesting as the races themselves.
Now, I doubt that everyone was as stubbornly insistent as my friends or my brother and I were to make these games live up to the promise they showed in the Catalog. Undoubtedly, many electric football games rarely emerged from their boxes after a while. Most electric race sets probably gathered dust for months while storage boxes slowly took over their basement layouts. A large number of toy soldiers eventually became the victims of strategically placed firecrackers. So, it took some work to make these games pay off.
Still, virtually everyone I know vividly remembers playing these games. They remember all their quirks, all their sights and sounds. They remember the sheer thrill when an electric football play which looked just like a real play unfolded on that buzzing green metal field or the giddy excitement caused by a couple of inch-and-a-half long race cars zipping side by side around the black plastic Le Mans layout for three whole laps.
Alas, the Catalog is history now, replaced by the horde of specialized mini-catalogs, the Home Shopping Network and the Internet. So, it only seems appropriate that the classic, three-dimensional, hands-on games of my youth are fading away as well, replaced by flashy video game versions of the same thing.
These games, with their photo-realistic graphics and you-are-there action, are effectively eliminating the line between what's a game and what's the real thing to a frightening degree. Sports-themed video games look more and more like TV coverage of the real thing while TV covers the actual games with graphics that mimic those found in the video games. It's impossible to tell now who's copying whom.
At the risk of sounding like a prematurely old fogy, there's something sad about the loss of these older toys. Picking up and holding that little miniature Richard Petty Special -- like its real-life counterpart, the fastest of all my electric racers -- somehow made it more real.
A kid today can pop in a cartridge, guide the most recently digitized version of the Dallas Cowboys through an entire sixteen game schedule, the playoffs, and on to a Super Bowl win all in one afternoon.
And it will all be forgotten tomorrow.
My Bears were trailing Mike's Giants 17-10 with about twenty minutes to go in the third quarter of the last electric football game I ever played. That was thirty years ago and I still remember.
In spite of -- maybe because of -- the fact that we had to work so hard to make those glamorous toys live up to their hype, they remain lodged in my consciousness all these years later. The memories remain because the games were real, tangible, not just a transient collection of digital imagery.
Oh, well. Like it or not, the Catalog is gone, which is too bad. It'd be nice to order some of that stuff from Santa again. And maybe one of those lingerie models while I was at it.
