JCPenney Catalog

                                              

I was trying to explain to my kids the mythical tome of wonder that was the JCPenney catalog when I was a kid. We lived in rural New Jersey. The nearest store with toys was 17 miles away, so to see all those toys, toys there weren't even commercials for, in one place was nothing short of amazing. I tried to explain that even now I can smell those thin, crinkly pages. It is the smell of magic. Of possibility. I can remember going through the pages again and again, painstakingly trying to assign an order to my lust for each and every Breyer model horse. But it wasn't even about the individual toys so much as it was about the idea that the world held mysteries and delights beyond anything I could imagine and, once a year, if I circled carefully, they could be mine.