This really does make me sad, getting the Wards, Sears, and JC Penney's catalogs before Xmas was always a huge event in my life when I was a kid.
I would pore through all three for weeks and fold over a corner on a page that showed something I wanted....the corner was down on the side I wanted to point out attention to, but I don't think I used a pen or pencil to mark the exact item so I don't know how my mom knew what I really wanted. She figured it out somehow! I guess I would get maybe 5% of what I asked for, but dreaming about what I might actually get was the fun part.
I usually thought Wards was "nicer" than Sears and that Penney's was kind of weird, but they were really quite similar. We usually went to Wards because there was one close in Skokie while Sears was a longer drive away in Golf.
I knew that was coming at some point, but it still gets me down. Was going to cut through the local Sears at our closest mall when we took our daughter shopping yesterday, but I decided it would make me too upset.