Long before online auctions and Facebook Marketplace, one enormous Christmas catalog helped turn glowing plastic Santas, snowmen and candles into American holiday traditions.
There was a time when Christmas arrived in the mail.
Not in a cardboard box.
Not with a tracking number.
And definitely not in a padded envelope containing something you ordered at 11:47 p.m. because your phone told you there were “ONLY 3 LEFT.”
Christmas arrived as a book.
A very big book.
For generations of American families, the appearance of the Sears Christmas catalog—the legendary Wish Book—meant the holiday season had unofficially begun.
Children went straight for the toys.
Dad found the tools.
Mom looked at clothes, housewares and gifts.
And somewhere among hundreds of pages of merchandise were the things that would eventually become irresistible to another group entirely:
future collectors.
Toy trains.
Barbie dolls.
Slot-car sets.
Bicycles.
Christmas ornaments.
And, of course…
those wonderful illuminated plastic figures that would eventually become known simply as blow molds.
Today, collectors might spend hours searching estate sales, antique malls, Marketplace listings and online auctions for an old Empire Santa or vintage plastic candle.
But decades ago?
You could simply open the Sears catalog.
And that catalog helped change the American Christmas landscape.
Before the Wish Book Was the Wish Book
Sears had been helping Americans shop by mail long before anyone called its Christmas catalog the Wish Book.
The company’s catalog roots date to the late 1880s. By the 1890s, Sears was offering an astonishing range of merchandise by mail, eventually creating what amounted to a department store delivered directly to the customer’s home.
Christmas merchandise arrived surprisingly early in that story.
The 1896 general catalog offered wax candles for Christmas trees. Christmas cards appeared by 1898. Tree ornaments arrived in 1900, artificial Christmas trees and stockings by 1910, and electric Christmas-tree lights by 1912.
Then, in 1933, Sears issued its first dedicated Christmas Book.
It was just 87 pages.
Inside were toys and gifts that sound like somebody emptied an antique store onto a catalog page: Lionel trains, a Mickey Mouse watch, a battery-powered toy automobile, fruitcakes, chocolates—and even live singing canaries.
Yes.
You could apparently order a bird for Christmas.
Amazon still hasn’t topped that.
Customers had already informally referred to Sears catalogs as “Wish Books” or “Books of Wishes,” but Sears officially put Wish Book on its Christmas catalog in 1968. By then, it had become enormous: the 1968 edition ran 605 pages, including 225 pages of toys and 380 pages of adult gifts.
But the significance of those pages went far beyond shopping.
Sears Didn’t Just Sell Christmas. It Showed America What Christmas Could Look Like.
This is where the story intersects with blow molds.
It’s difficult today to appreciate the cultural power of a national catalog.
There was no Pinterest.
No Instagram.
No Amazon recommendations.
No YouTube video called:
“10 CHRISTMAS YARD DECOR TRENDS YOU NEED IN 1967!!!”
For millions of households, catalogs were discovery engines.
They showed you things you didn’t even know existed.
And when an illuminated plastic Santa, snowman, candle or Nativity figure appeared among the Christmas merchandise, Sears wasn’t merely providing a way to purchase it.
Sears was putting the idea in your head.
Imagine being a child paging through a Christmas catalog in the 1960s.
There’s Santa.
But this Santa is different.
He’s three-dimensional.
He’s colorful.
He lights up.
And apparently he can stand outside your house.
You don’t need to know the term blow molding.
You don’t need to know who manufactured it.
You don’t need to understand polyethylene.
You know only one thing:
WE NEED THAT SANTA.
That is how traditions begin.
The Catalog Was the Original Algorithm
Today, Amazon learns what you like.
Search for one vintage Christmas decoration and suddenly the internet decides:
Excellent. This person would like to see illuminated plastic snowmen until death.
The Sears Wish Book accomplished something remarkably similar without tracking cookies.
You opened the catalog looking for one thing.
Then you discovered another.
A train set led to a slot-car set.
A doll led to a dollhouse.
Christmas lights led to lawn decorations.
And one illuminated Santa could lead to a snowman.
Then candles.
Then a Nativity.
Then a choir boy.
Then another Santa because apparently the first Santa was lonely.
Congratulations.
You have accidentally started a collection.
There’s real collector testimony behind that idea. Collector and writer Carrie Polales Sansing has recalled looking through Sears Wish Books and JCPenney holiday catalogs with her mother in the mid-1960s while deciding which decorations to add to their growing Christmas display. She remembered repeatedly being drawn to the same type of decoration: plastic figures that lit up.
That’s a small memory that explains something much bigger.
Catalogs didn’t merely distribute products.
They created desire, repetition and tradition.
From Product to Family Tradition
Suppose your parents ordered a glowing Santa in 1969.
Every December, Dad brought Santa down from the attic.
You watched him untangle the cord.
Santa went beside the front steps.
Christmas officially began.
1968.
1969.
1970.
1971.
Year after year.
Eventually, Santa wasn’t simply something Sears sold.
He was your family’s Santa.
That’s the emotional transformation at the heart of vintage holiday collecting.
Mass-produced objects become intensely personal.
A plastic decoration that rolled off an assembly line alongside thousands of identical pieces somehow becomes:
the Santa that stood outside Grandma’s house.
the candles that flanked the front door.
the Nativity Dad assembled every December.
the snowman you could see glowing through your bedroom window.
The catalog got the object into the house.
Time turned it into an heirloom.
And Sears Was Doing This With Almost Everything
That’s why the Wish Book matters beyond blow molds.
Look at many of today’s collecting categories and you’ll find fingerprints from the great catalog era.
Lionel trains appeared in the very first 1933 Christmas Book.
Across subsequent decades, catalogs presented Americans with toys, sporting goods, clothing, appliances, electronics, musical instruments and countless other products. Sears itself later described its catalogs as a kind of historical record of changing American desires and habits, and researchers have used them to trace everything from fashions and home furnishings to sporting equipment.
That’s exactly why old catalogs have become so valuable to collectors today.
They answer questions.
What year was this sold?
What did it originally cost?
Was this color available?
Was it sold as a set?
What accessories came with it?
What did the manufacturer originally call it?
For a collector, an old catalog isn’t merely nostalgia.
It’s evidence.
The Wish Book Helped Create Tomorrow’s Collectors
There’s another fascinating part of this story.
Children didn’t have purchasing power.
But they had something retailers understood almost as well:
circles.
A child could sit on the living-room carpet with a pen and create a surprisingly sophisticated fourth-quarter procurement strategy.
Circle.
Circle.
Huge circle.
Arrow.
Three stars.
“THIS ONE.”
Parents learned exactly what their children wanted.
And those children remembered.
Decades later, the toys and objects we wanted but couldn’t have often became the things we collected when we finally had disposable income.
The train.
The action figure.
The doll.
The bicycle.
The lunchbox.
The Christmas decoration.
Collecting is often nostalgia with a checking account.
And the Wish Book supplied an enormous amount of the nostalgia.
Why Old Catalog Pages Matter So Much to Blow Mold Collectors
For today’s blow mold collector, vintage catalogs provide something memory can’t always supply:
context.
Finding an old Santa at an estate sale is exciting.
Finding that same Santa pictured in a period catalog?
Now you can see him as shoppers originally saw him.
Maybe he was photographed beside coordinating candles.
Maybe several figures were offered together.
Maybe the catalog reveals an original price.
Maybe the description provides dimensions.
Maybe a tiny detail helps distinguish one production era from another.
That turns a decoration into an artifact.
And that’s one reason old catalogs, advertisements, manufacturer literature and photographs are so important when researching blow mold history.
They’re breadcrumbs.
They help us reconstruct an industry that nobody imagined we’d someday be studying this closely.
Because remember:
These weren’t created as collectibles.
They were Christmas decorations.
People put them outside.
Snow fell on them.
Rain hit them.
Sun faded them.
Children knocked them over.
Dogs investigated them.
Parents shoved them into attics.
Garages baked them every summer.
Extension cords were lost.
Bulbs burned out.
Paint disappeared.
And somehow…
they survived.
The Catalog Era Helped Make Blow Molds National
This may be the Sears Wish Book’s greatest contribution to the story.
A regional store can create a local trend.
A national catalog can create a national visual language.
Families separated by hundreds or thousands of miles could encounter similar holiday merchandise.
The glowing plastic Santa wasn’t limited to one department store window in one town.
Catalog distribution gave products enormous geographic reach.
The same basic style of illuminated holiday figure could become familiar in neighborhoods across America.
And when enough houses displayed them, they stopped looking novel.
They started looking like:
Christmas.
That’s an extraordinary transition.
Plastic became nostalgia.
Manufacturing became tradition.
Commerce became memory.
Sears Wasn’t Alone
Of course, Sears wasn’t the only catalog helping build this world.
JCPenney and Montgomery Ward holiday catalogs also brought merchandise directly into American homes. Collector memories specifically connect Sears and JCPenney catalogs with discovering illuminated plastic Christmas decorations.
Together, these catalogs functioned almost like annual snapshots of American consumer culture.
Today we scroll.
Then, we turned pages.
And unlike a webpage that disappears when someone redesigns a site, those pages remained tucked inside closets, basements and attics.
Which is why a fifty-year-old catalog can now help identify a fifty-year-old decoration.
Then the Catalog Disappeared
Sears discontinued its famous general “Big Book” catalog in 1993, closing an era of American retail that had begun more than a century earlier.
The timing almost seems symbolic.
Two years later, Amazon shipped its first book.
One shopping revolution was ending.
Another was beginning.
Today, finding a blow mold is easier in one sense.
Search.
Click.
Buy.
A collector in California can discover a decoration in Ohio before breakfast.
But something was lost along the way.
The anticipation.
The discovery.
The shared catalog sitting on the coffee table.
The folded corners.
The circled toys.
The handwritten notes.
The page you returned to twenty times because you wanted to make absolutely sure Santa understood.
And That’s Why We Still Care
This is one of the themes running throughout The Glow That Won’t Go Out.
Blow molds aren’t interesting merely because they’re old plastic decorations.
They’re interesting because they sit at the intersection of manufacturing history, retail history, holiday tradition and personal memory.
Companies manufactured them.
Retailers distributed them.
Catalogs introduced them.
Families adopted them.
Children remembered them.
Collectors rescued them.
And now, decades later, we’re trying to piece the story back together.
That old Sears Wish Book in Grandma’s living room probably wasn’t treated like an important historical document.
It was just the Christmas catalog.
That glowing Santa wasn’t an artifact.
It was just the thing Dad plugged in by the front porch.
Nobody knew anyone would care fifty years later.
But we do.
And maybe that’s the real reason these decorations refuse to disappear.
The companies changed.
The catalogs vanished.
The department stores faded.
The original price tags were thrown away.
But somewhere tonight, another collector will plug in an old plastic Santa.
The bulb will flicker on.
The faded red plastic will begin glowing.
And for just a second, Christmas will look exactly the way someone remembers it.
That’s the glow that won’t go out.
KEEP THE GLOW ALIVE
The Glow That Won’t Go Out explores the history, manufacturers, designs, collectors and cultural story behind the vintage holiday blow molds that once illuminated America’s front lawns—and are now being rediscovered by a new generation.
From the golden age of companies such as Empire, General Foam and Union Products to identification, restoration, displaying and the hunt itself, the book tells the story behind decorations that became far more important than anyone expected.
Because sometimes an old piece of plastic isn’t just an old piece of plastic.
Sometimes it’s Christmas at Grandma’s house.