Just in time for your mad dash to the mall comes this year’s list of the top ten worst toys to buy for your child this Christmas. The annual list as been produced for the last 35 years by a group called WATCH (World Against Toys Causing Harm).

The list causes me to wonder whether our parents ever worried about the things this group says we should worry about, like putting out an eye out with the sticks in the Tinker-Toy box or the sparks from the cap gun burning us (or worse yet, the cap gun causing us to grow up with criminal intentions!).

The list also reminds me (with lots of warm fuzzies) about how as a very young child I used to anticipate the arrival of the Sears Christmas Wish Book each fall. As soon as it came I would lay across the living room floor with it spread open before me, all of its colors and the smell of the ink on its glossy pages putting me into a Christmas trance as I circled item after item throughout its pages. I would then present it to my mother after Thanksgiving as “my Christmas wish list.”

I never got everything I circled in that catalog. Looking back I don’t think I ever really expected to. The joy was in the wanting and the wishing, not in the receiving; in the recognition that there is a certain satisfaction that comes from not having your every whim satisfied. I fear today’s children don’t know THAT joy at all.

The memory of perusing that catalog for hours on end still brings a smile to my face even as I type. If you’re racking your brain trying to figure out what to get me for Christmas this year - how ’bout a Sears Christmas Wish Book? The Wish Book actually went online in 1998 - but when I put my nose to the screen of my laptop, it’s somehow not the same!