The Amazon Holiday Kids Gift Book, which just recently hit mailboxes months ahead of Christmas, has become the modern child’s wish book — a glossy stand-in for the toy store aisles their parents once roamed. It sparks the same giddy anticipation that used to come from pressing noses to store windows, something today’s kids see in old-timey movies such as “A Christmas Story” and struggle to comprehend.

The Amazon Christmas catalog serves as a sort of bridge from our past to the current moment, in which online retailers dominate.

But even in an age of scrolling and same-day shipping, the simple act of circling toys with a marker still does the better job.

We know plenty of kids who are fighting right now over this glossy catalog; who have special labeling systems for their Christmas requests; who can be found sleeping in bed with the book clutched close to their chest, their pen on the floor having rolled off the bed as they dreamt about the gifts under the tree.

Don’t tell those kids that print is dead; Amazon, of all companies, doesn’t think so. They might not know that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (a 1930s creation of the copywriter, Robert L. May, working for a Montgomery Ward toy catalog) is a Chicagoan, but they know the fun of charting their desires on glossy paper.

Kids like books. They like holding things in their hands. They like colors and pictures.

Amazon is reviving what Montgomery Ward tapped into all those years ago. And they are not the only ones.

Target is also out with its own holiday catalog. And beyond online, one old-school toy seller is making a brick-and-mortar comeback.

Toys R Us, which filed for bankruptcy in 2017, began making a comeback in the early 2020s when it launched pop-ups inside Macy’s locations, re-creating the shopping experience 1990s kids remember so well. The toy retailer has since opened Chicago-area locations at the Chicago Premium Outlets in Aurora and Harlem Irving Plaza in Norridge. This year, just in time for the holidays, the brand is opening 10 new stores and 20 holiday shops across the country.

Say what you will about consumerism ruining the holiday. Even the Scrooges among us remember that feeling we all got opening a much-desired toy on Christmas morning, which was almost as good as dreaming about it for months before.

We’re happy to report that print is back. The Christmas catalog isn’t some newfangled trend, it’s a return to the norm, and it’s effective. Long before one-click shopping, Chicago figured out how to deliver wonder to a child’s doorstep.

Eighty-six years later, it still works.

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