The Sears Wish Book: How a Christmas Catalog Became a Family Tradition

Picture a boy lying on the living room floor in the winter of 1968, flat on his stomach, elbows planted, turning the pages of a catalog that ran 605 pages long. Of those pages, 225 were nothing but toys.

That catalog was the Sears Wish Book, and for millions of American families it was as much a part of the season as the first snow or the smell of baking. It did not ask you to buy anything.

It only asked you to wish. Children circled, parents hid it on high shelves, and the whole house seemed to lean toward Christmas morning. Before there were screens to scroll, there was a thick paper book that landed on the porch and changed the mood of a home.

Let us remember when.

The Night the Book Arrived

The first Sears Christmas Book appeared in 1933, during the hardest years of the Great Depression, when a little hope went a long way. That first edition ran 87 pages. Of those, 25 pages were given over to toys and 62 pages to gifts for grown folks.

Money was tight across the country, yet here came a book full of wonders a family could at least look at together by the lamp. The timing was no accident. A catalog that cost nothing to page through gave children a season of wishing even when parents could buy only a little.

In homes without much, the book itself felt like a gift. Mothers used it to teach counting and reading. Fathers studied the tool pages. And the children, well, they knew exactly which corner they wanted turned down.

The book arrived by mail, and in many small towns the mailman who carried it became, for a few weeks each year, a kind of quiet Santa on his daily route.

From a Railroad Watch Seller to a National Habit

The Wish Book did not come from nowhere. It grew out of one of the great American business stories. Richard Warren Sears was born in 1863, the son of a blacksmith, and worked as a railroad station agent in North Redwood, Minnesota.

When a shipment of watches went unwanted by a local jeweler, young Sears bought and resold them, and in 1886 he started the R.W. Sears Watch Company. He soon advertised for a watch repairman, and a man named Alvah Roebuck answered.

In 1888 they mailed their first catalog, 80 pages of watches and jewelry. On September 16, 1893, they renamed the company Sears, Roebuck and Co. The catalog kept growing.

By 1894 it ran 322 pages and added sewing machines, firearms, buggies, and bicycles. By 1896 it carried dolls, stoves, and groceries. For the roughly 65 percent of Americans who lived in the countryside in 1890, that book was the department store they could never otherwise reach, delivered right to the farm gate.

The Year It Finally Got Its Name

For decades, customers had their own pet name for the big Sears catalogs. They called them the Wish Book, or the Book of Wishes, long before any sign on the cover said so.

Sears finally made the nickname official in 1968, when the Christmas catalog became, in print, The Wish Book. That 1968 edition was a true doorstop at 605 pages, with 225 pages of toys and 380 pages of gifts for adults.

Compare that to the slim 87 pages of 1933 and you can see how far the thing had grown in a single lifetime. The covers became a tradition all their own, warm scenes of children, Christmas trees, and Santa himself.

Families saved old covers and set them out year after year. The name stuck because it was honest. Nobody expected to order every page. You simply wished. In a season built on wanting, a book that invited wanting was the perfect companion, and children treated it with the care usually saved for a storybook.

Dog-Earing the Toy Pages

Ask anyone who grew up with the Wish Book and they will describe the same ritual, almost word for word. The book came, and the children claimed it. They turned to the toy pages first, those 225 pages in the thick editions, and they got to work.

Some circled their wishes in crayon or pen. Some folded down the corners of pages, leaving a trail of creases that said, plain as day, I would like this one. Brothers and sisters fought over whose turn it was to hold it.

Mothers learned to check the corners when deciding what to buy. The listings were not just toys either. There were bicycles, train sets, cowboy outfits, dolls, chemistry kits, and sporting goods, each with a small drawing and a price.

A child could spend a whole snowy afternoon planning a Christmas that would never fully come true, and somehow that was the fun of it. The wishing cost nothing. It filled the weeks of waiting with something better than getting, which was hoping.

You Could Even Order a House

The reach of the Sears catalog is hard to imagine today. From 1908 to 1940, Sears sold entire homes by mail through its Modern Homes program. A family picked a house from a catalog, and the lumber, nails, hardware, and plans arrived by railroad car, often many thousands of pieces, ready to be put together by the new owners and their neighbors, much like an old-fashioned barn raising.

More than 70,000 of these homes were sold across North America. Prices varied by model and by year. The grandest house, called the Magnolia, was listed at $5,140 in its 1918 catalog and climbed to $6,488 by the early 1920s.

Those figures covered only the shipped kit of materials. The land, the foundation, the plumbing and wiring, and the labor to raise the house all cost extra, so a finished home ran well beyond the catalog price.

Many of these homes are still lived in today, standing quietly on ordinary streets. If a company could mail you a house, then mailing you a Christmas catalog full of toys seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

The Last Pages Turn

All good things, even thick ones, come to an end. The catalog business that Aaron Montgomery Ward had started on August 18, 1872, with a single sheet of paper listing 163 items, slowly faded as shopping habits changed.

Montgomery Ward stopped its mail-order catalog in 1985 after more than a century. In 1993 Sears announced it would end its big general catalog, the one shoppers called the Big Book, along with the full-line Wish Book.

Smaller specialty catalogs kept coming, but the thick book that had warmed winters since 1933 went quiet, and many families kept their last copies. The book did return, at least for a while.

In 2007 Sears revived the Wish Book, though at a trim 188 pages it was a shadow of the 605-page giant older readers remembered. Still, the memory outlasted the paper. For anyone who ever lay on a cold floor turning those pages, the Wish Book was never really about shopping.

It was about the particular joy of wanting something at Christmas, and sharing that wanting with the people you loved.

If the memory warms you, do something with it this season. Dig through the attic or a closet for any old catalog, cover, or circled page you saved, and set it out where the family can see it.

Call your brother or sister and compare the toys you each begged for. Tell a grandchild about lying on the floor and folding down corners, and let them pick what they would have circled.

You can also find images of old Sears catalogs preserved online through the Sears Archives, free to page through. The lesson the Wish Book taught still holds. The waiting and the wishing, done together, can be the best part of Christmas.

You do not need 605 pages to pass that on. You only need to tell the story.

Sources

• Sears Archives, The Sears Christmas Wish Book: A Holiday Tradition
• Sears Archives, Chronology of the Sears Catalog
• Chicago History Museum, Montgomery Ward's First Catalog (1872)
• NPR, Sears Is Fading, But Memories Of Its Mail-Order Homes Endure (2018)
• Associated Press, Sears Brings Back the Wish Book Catalog (2007)
• Harvey County Historical Society, Every Toy a Kid Could Want: The Wish Book