The Sears Wish Book was a BIG deal when we were coming along, when the mail lady Irene Taylor delivered those catalogs the only sound you could hear in SignPost were the crickets and the sound of pages turning. Well, and at my house squawking with my brothers about what section of the catalog we were going to peruse first, girls or boys! The only place I wanted to be was on my belly on the living room floor thumbing through that catalog and circling what I wanted for Christmas with a marker.

One year I got an avocado green kitchen set and an inch worm! Another year a doll the same height as me. Other years I got a record player and a disco ball for my room and a jewelry box with a spinning ballerina and 30 totally different pairs of earrings, all fastened to a calendar, a pair for every day of the month from Avon. I got “day of the week” underwear for Christmas and I hated to wear the wrong pair on the wrong day!

Sometimes all 3 of us got a new bicycle from Santa. Plenty of match box cars, tonka trucks, cap guns, Lone Ranger stuff, Dukes of Hazzard stuff, army men and many years a race track set for those little cars because my dad loved those as much as my brothers did. Those tracks used static electricity to race and gave off a funny smell, especially when it was a new track.

One of my very favorite Christmas gifts was when Santa brought me a green Pogo stick and I got so good on that thing I could do it with no hands, only my knees holding the stick and jumping all around town. I bet everyone was glad when that thing wore out!