Dave Wood

With Christmas beckoning, the mail-order shopping season is upon us and I’m getting a tad sick of receiving glossy catalogs from companies I’ve never heard of. 

It wasn’t always that way. In my younger days I remember the happy times I spent with my father sitting on two of the holes of our three-hole outhouse, perusing a Sears or a Monkey Ward giant catalog from the previous year, now doing double duty as toilet tissue (our supply of peach wrappers having been exhausted soon after canning season). My father, tired of milking by hand under kerosene lantern light, studied the section on milking machines and Delco electric systems because the banker who owned our farm refused to electrify the farm when Franklin Roosevelt’s REA came through our coulee. Fifty dollars for a light pole? Too much said the banker. Meanwhile, my mother was sitting by a kerosene lamp perusing the NEW Monkey Ward and wondering if our household could afford anything at all for Christmas, like maybe a new girdle.

We don’t get Sears and Monkey Ward catalogs anymore or even know if they exist. But catalogs? They cram our mailbox every day, sent from sunny Arizona to wind swept Maine. None make mention of DeLaval milking systems or ladies’ undergarments for mother or shiny Hawthorne bicycles with the funny handlebars for Yours Truly. Or anything truly as practical as a house! (Yes! One could be purchased through catalog mail order. For a reference, see Faith Sullivan’s wonderful novel titled The Cape Ann, in which a mother and daughter plot for years to save enough money to put in their order for that style of house.)

No, the present-day catalogs are much more esoteric, usually featuring items no one really needs. A few weeks ago, we received a 70-page glossy from Georgia devoted to offering pecans, nothing else, in every permutation from brittle to sugar dipped. And that was just the beginning in this society which has come to the point that every home needs a rental storage space out on the edge of town.

A catalog called “American Spoon” recently arrived from Michigan. No, it wasn’t selling spoons, but jars of stuff you stick spoons in. Eight-ounce jars of chili jam, peach habanero jelly, apple and onion jam. For only $12.95 apiece. “Shipping is just $10 if you order 12 jars!” Need a gift box? Send a box to your favorite auntie filled with maple granola, wheat and malt pancake mix, whiskey maple syrup, holiday jam, peppermint caramel, star thistle honey. Now just $115. Might these items have been losers last season, or am I overly suspicious?

Mackenzie Ltd. of Maryland offers a two-pound turkey breast stuffed with sage dressing for only $56.95. For the aesthete one can order four Rock Cornish Game Hens for $89.95. “Pure sophistication!” Wait! Something’s missing. Gravy of course. Mackenzie can send you two pounds of turkey gravy, “like grandma used to make” in a plastic bag for $29.95.

An Italophile or a linguist on your list might hope you got the catalog that just arrived. Uno Alla Volta from Connecticut offers all manner of artisanal stuff, including an item that should be easy to wrap. It’s a Limoges porcelain holiday nutcracker. It’s 3 ¼” inches tall, gift box included, for only $399.

So I have to acknowledge that we’ve really advanced our sophistication since those days with Monkey Ward. Only one problem: The catalogs are so glossy and printed on such hard paper, you can’t rub them together and employ them comfortably for their final destination when you run out of peach wrappers.

Dave would like to hear from you. Phone him at 715-426-9554.