2012 Indie Excellence Finalist in the Holiday Division.
This beautiful story of a nostalgic look back when the "Wish Book" Sears catalog was the only way children would get their Christmas wishes.
The specialized Sears Christmas Catalog, nicknamed the Wishbook - began in the mid 1930's. It became a holiday staple in virtually every American home.
Not realized at the time, the Sears catalogs were recording the changing scene in America and represented the daily lives and work of thousands of Americans.
From the Author:
We lived in a valley called Eagle Creek, which is on the eastern side of Arizona between the Apache Indian reservation and the New Mexico State line. The mail came once a week.
We had no electricity, no indoor bathroom and the water was pumped into the house by a windmill. I lived there with my Mother, Father, Brother, Sister, Grandmother and my Uncle that lived out in the bunkhouse.
A catalog was something that we always welcomed into the home. There were feed catalogs, seed catalogs, clothes catalogs and dry goods catalogs.
We enjoyed every one of them. They seem to take us on a journey that we would have never went on unless the catalog arrived.
We ordered mostly out of two catalogs, the Sears, and the Wards catalogs. We ordered our dry goods out of these two catalogs.
When Christmas came around, we didn't have any malls to browse through but we had something that was better. There was one special catalog that us children loved to see arrive.
As a matter of fact the person that took it out of the mailbox was almost a hero for an hour or so. It arrived around the middle of October; it was the Sears Roebuck Christmas catalog.