Last month, Sears Canada announced that their Holiday Wish Book would be made "virtual" as an iPad app.

So instead of kids dog-earing pages or circling desired toys and other items, now they can simply search through items in the "virtual" catalogue, "tap" the product they want and then log in into a gift wish list to help manage the "shopping experience".

Interestingly enough however, is the interest online for the print version — namely scanned pages that people have uploaded for mass consumption of holiday nostalgia.

Indeed, there's even an archive site called WishbookWeb, an archival project that collects the catalogues in "a historical and cultural context" for those that desire to "see the catalogs they enjoyed from their past, and reminisce at the memories they trigger".

Here's a sampling of just some of those scans:

1957 Canadian Simpsons-Sears Christmas Catalogue

1964 Sears Christmas Catalogue

1975 Sears Wish List Catalogue

1979 Canadian Simpsons-Sears Catalogue

1987 Canadian Sears Christmas Catalogue

So in looking at these scans in a historical context, does it reveal something profound about how holiday consumerism reflected the trends and thinking of the society they were made for?

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