Matt Winters

There were two holy books in our family home at Christmastime: their titles were Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. My cousin Bob Bell and I reminisced last week about our fascination with the giant holiday catalogs from these former titans of American retailing.

Our little mountain town had nothing whatsoever like a department store. I didn’t realize such wonders existed until age 11, when Aunt Lucille took me to the downtown Seattle Bon Marché. Like a Soviet-era defector set loose on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, the overload was such that all I wanted was a small box of chocolate-covered pretzels.

We may have pictured how our young hick lives would be transformed by the toys and sporting goods crowding catalog pages.

But “imagining is much better than possessing” is the moral of the story when it came to our innocently lusting after that stuff — even though sleds, .22 rifles, Hot Wheels cars and pogo sticks all were essential ingredients in my boyhood. We spent many hours studying the “boy” sections, scoffing at the dolls in the “girl” sections, and somewhat guiltily flipping through the young ladies’ underwear pages in that ancient era before sex was everywhere. Mom and my two Bell family aunts had 10 boys in a row, so everything about girls was a total mystery to me until at least high school — maybe even a little still today.

The top-of-the-line sled in a 1959 Wards Christmas catalog, a Deluxe Comet, sold for $11.98. Seeing it brings to mind a bright Dec. 25 morning on the icy gravel lane between my parents’ place and my uncle’s ranch, pulled behind Dad’s big Jeep. Squeals of excitement were fun while they lasted. Perhaps with a greater stake in our survival, Mom called a stop to it — no doubt worried the hard-to-stop sled might speed downhill under the turning wheels. My brothers, cousins and I continued, however, to ride unprotected in the backs of pickup trucks for another decade. One rollover could have wiped out a generation.

Some considerable part of the joy we derive from Christmas comes from rehearing carols that conjure up living memories of childhood. Though it’s hardly a timeless masterpiece, Bing Crosby’s “Silver Bells” instantly transports me to the squeaking Naugahyde seat of my mother’s Buick at a particular intersection on a specific frigid, slushy December day in my hometown. We’re listening on AM radio to “City sidewalks, busy sidewalks | Dressed in holiday style | In the air there’s a feeling of Christmas | Children laughing, people passing | Meeting smile after smile | And on every street corner you hear | Silver bells, silver bells.” Today, thinking of those lyrics isn’t so much nostalgia as time travel: I can touch and hear my Mom as we bustle around buying last-minute gifts for Christmas 1968.

Forty years later in 2008, I did my best to instill at least one sledding memory in my daughter Elizabeth, trekking up to a thick and slippery carpet of crusted powder blanketing the hills surrounding David Douglas Park east of Seaside. We trudged upward into the cold clouds. Sliding along logging roads made wondrous by mantles of unblemished white, our delight enveloped us, tangible but fleeting as frozen breath in the frigid air. Tossing up a bow wave of icy particles that turned my bushy eyebrows into caterpillar-sized flocked Christmas trees, I shushed from adulthood into the idealized past.

Elizabeth, always playfully competitive and invariably faster than her old man, for once lost the race.

This was no tribute to my superior sledding skills but to my sugar addiction, which gives me a mighty weight advantage — once I work up some momentum, I’m hard to stop — just like that Deluxe Comet on that long-ago country road, rocketing along at the end of a taut clothesline.

I have few of my parents’ Christmas gifts — material objects evaporate from our lives like April snow — but realize now how much they struggled financially to afford each soon-discarded present.

Every page corner a boy turned over in a Christmas catalog must have made them fret over how they’d pay January bills. Our parents’ hard-bought gifts, wise words and small gestures still echo all through our lives.

I hope your folks were as good, kind and generous as mine. At Christmas they feel close enough to brush with a kiss.