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I miss Christmas catalogs.
Back in the day, the 3 major retail department stores – Sears, JC Penney, and Montgomery Ward – would mail seasonal catalogs hawking all their merchandise. As a kid, though, the only ones I cared about were the Christmas versions. The day they arrived at the post office was always a happy one. Long before WalMart, Target, and Amazon, and long before pop-up ads that now interrupt every web page you browse, these thick, heavy, books served to entice and then to sell thousands of items that everyone absolutely needed to have. And the Christmas catalogs had pages and pages of toys. Of course, half of the toy pages featured dolls and other girl stuff. Ho hum. But the other half were overflowing with pictures and descriptions of items that promised to make my little boy heart happy: race car sets, dump trucks, reel-to-reel tape recorders, bicycles…the list could go on and on.
I would sit for hours studying those hallowed pages. I would hope, wish, dream, and yearn for that blessed morn to come on the 25th of December when at least some of those toys might magically appear under the tree in the living room, that back in those days we had gone to the forest to cut down and bring home in the back of Dad’s chevy pickup.
The day after tomorrow, we begin the season of Advent. In a sense, we begin to wait. And in our waiting, we’ll talk about wishing and dreaming for something so much more profound than toys. Read Isaiah 64:1-5a and I Corinthians 1:3-9. Ponder the promise and the fulfillment of that promise in these passages and prepare to hear this message: “Sing We Now of Christmas: Yearning and Hope.”
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