It came in the mail sometime in the fall, and it landed on the porch with a thud.
The Sears Wish Book. Thick as a phone book, glossy in the toy section, smelling like fresh ink. Whoever got to it first disappeared with it for an hour. By December, the toy pages were soft and wrinkled, the corners were folded down, and there were red circles on half the dolls and race car sets in the book.
That was the list. Everybody knew it was the list.
The Tools
The Wish Book itself. Sears's Christmas catalog, full of toys, clothes, gadgets, and gifts.
A red crayon or marker, for circling.
The order form in the back, plus a pencil and the family checkbook.
The phone, the mail, or the Sears store, depending on how your family ordered.
Where It Came From
Sears, Roebuck and Co. was a mail-order company before it was a chain of stores. Its big general catalog went out to homes across the country, and in rural areas it was a lifeline to goods you couldn't get in town. The Los Angeles Times once wrote that the catalog "rivaled the Holy Bible" as one of America's most widely read books.
In 1933, Sears added something new: a catalog just for Christmas. According to Good Housekeeping, that first Christmas Book featured "Miss Pigtails" dolls, five-pound boxes of chocolates, and live singing canaries. It was under 100 pages.
It grew every decade. In 1968, Sears officially named it the Wish Book, and by then it ran to more than 600 pages, with more than 200 pages of toys alone, according to the Harvey County Historical Society.
Step by Step
- **Wait for it.** The Wish Book usually arrived in the fall, well before Thanksgiving.
- **Study it.** Kids went through the toy section page by page, sometimes for hours.
- **Circle everything.** Red circles, folded corners, and sometimes a helpful note in the margin.
- **Narrow it down.** Parents had other ideas about how many things a person really needed.
- **Order.** Fill out the order form and mail it, call it in, or go to the catalog desk at a Sears store.
- **Wait again.** The packages came by mail or were picked up at the store, and somehow had to be hidden until Christmas.
The Tricks People Knew
Kids learned fast that leaving the Wish Book open to the right page, on the kitchen table, was a strategy. Parents learned to order early, before the popular toys sold out. And a lot of families kept the old Wish Books for years, because grown kids liked to look back at what they had wanted.
What Was Actually Better
The waiting. Weeks of looking at the same pages built a kind of excitement that a quick online search doesn't. For kids in small towns far from a big department store, the Wish Book was the toy store, the whole world of Christmas in one heavy book.
What We Don't Miss
The disappointment when the toy that looked enormous in the picture showed up much smaller. And the parents who had to keep a giant box hidden in a house full of curious kids.
Why It Ended
In January 1993, Sears announced it would stop publishing its catalog, which had lost about $500 million over three years, according to the Los Angeles Times. Shoppers had moved to malls, discount stores, and specialty catalogs, and the Wish Book went with the big book. Sears later took the Wish Book online, but for most of us it was never the same as the one that landed on the porch.
Still Around?
Old Wish Books are popular with collectors, and many have been scanned and shared online so people can find the exact page they circled as a kid. If you have one in the attic, it's a time capsule of everything a family wanted that year.
What toy did you circle in the Wish Book, and did you get it?
Sources
- "Sears Wish Book History," *Good Housekeeping*, Dec. 2019
- "Every Toy a Kid Could Want: The Wish Book," Harvey County Historical Society (Kansas), 2014
- "Death of 'Wish Book' Spells End to Century of Americana," *Los Angeles Times*, Jan. 26, 1993
- "Goodbye, Book of Dreams," *The Washington Post*, Jan. 26, 1993
Related Reading
- [What Was This Little Book For?](/remember-when/what-was-this-little-book-for)
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