•7:15 AM
The December holiday season is coming. Its approximately 80 days, maybe less depending on when you are reading this post.
Each year I try to start the shopping excursions early to finish early. And each year I find myself in with the crowds with a couple of weeks of shopping time left. This year, I am pleased to announce that I have started early - and I'm hoping to keep up the momentum.
As I mentioned in a previous post, the best part of the Holiday season when I grew up in Ottawa, was the anticipation of the Holiday catalogues coming to the door - from Sears, Consumer Distributing and Shop Rite. In those publications, I would spend hours scanning the pages and dreaming of things I would find under the tree on Christmas morning. Many of those toys and games still remain ingrained in my imagination to this day.
I practically squealed with delight when I came around the corner and spotted a modern version of "Rebound" at the local Wal-Mart. Wow - I hadn't seen a new box of that childhood game since I was 10. For those not familiar with it - its a type of shuffle board - with little padded metal balls which a player rolls and rebound against a Rubber Band. The object of the game is to get it close to the edge without going over.
If that wasn't enough - I also spotted KerPlunk. A game which involved marbles and a set of plastic twigs. These twigs are inserted into a plastic cylinder. The players pour the marbles in at the top of the cylinder and onto the twigs which block the marbles from falling through. The game players pull a twig out (one at a time) while still keeping all the marbles from falling through. The one player which causes all the marbles to fall is the loser.
Finally, I spotted an old friend from when I was very young. A Red Rocket metal wagon - which I used to have fun zipping around the drive way in. I used to kneel, with one knee in the wagon, and pushed myself forward with my free leg -- steering with the handle. Good fun when you're 5.
The more time moves forward, the more things come back from your past and seem like new to the current generations. Shopping, it feels like, will be as much about finding beautiful gifts for loved ones - as it will be about walking down memory lane.
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1 comments:
"As I mentioned in a previous post, the best part of the Holiday season when I grew up in Ottawa, was the anticipation of the Holiday catalogues coming to the door - from Sears, Consumer Distributing and Shop Rite. In those publications, I would spend hours scanning the pages and dreaming of things I would find under the tree on Christmas morning. Many of those toys and games still remain ingrained in my imagination to this day."
Ah catalogues and TV guides, too essential resources for children of our day that have more or less fallen by the wayside - well, moved online anyway.
The height of catalogue shopping though was Consumer Distributing...
I always remember the store that physically inside the Loblaws Superstore McArthur Ave just off Vanier Parkway. Man, that whole place was amazing in the early 1980s.
We used to shop at Steinberg's at Elmdale Shopping Centre, which was just near where we lived in Alta Vista. But the Loblaws Superstore became our new place when we moved to New Edinburgh. It might even have supplanted it while we lived in Alta Vista (can't remember exactly when it opened), as it was a real destination experience.
As a kid, it was awesome. Firstly, it was just so huge, at a time when grocery stores weren't that big. More importantly, it had a ball room - this glass case, where kids walked up a few stairs then jumped into a sea of little plastic balls. That was heaven.
But when you got tired of that, the Loblaws store had a drug store you could go wander around (again unusual for that time), but even better was the Consumer Distributing. Odds are you'd already scopped out stuff you wanted and would try to extort from your parents in exchange for having "dragged you" to the food store. I bought many an action figure at that place and was sorry to see the end of Consumer Distributing in the late 1990s, though I like many others I guess had stopped shopping there by then.
Reading its Wiki page below, I didn't realize that Consumer Distributing also owned the Toy City chain of stores. For those who don't know them, Toy City was like a Canadian version of Toys R Us (before it entered Canada) - a big box toy store, which again was unprecedented for Canadian shoppers. There wasn't one near us so had to find ways to prod my mom to drive me to the Westgate Shopping Centre in the west-end on Carling Ave. I loved that place with some kind of bear logo I think.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumers_Distributing
Anyway, with Toy City so far away, Consumers Distributing was a great toy resource, otherwise it was the mall chain Toy World, or maybe Sears, both in the Saint-Laurent Shopping Centre I think.
That reminds me, I have a question. I know that it is a Sears now in Saint-Laurent Shopping Centre, but was it always so? I seem to think that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, that store was actually a Simpsons or Simpsons-Sears. They were related companies and I know the names changed sometimes - Mark do you remember the history of the name of that store?
I have fond memories of that place too as I was into coin collecting and that store had a coin shop counter, which was not uncommon for department stores in those days, but became non-existant in later years.
One last thing, I don't remember Shop Rite. What was that about and where were they located?