A Dress From the Catalogue

Recently I was telling my grandsons about catalogues.  They had no idea what they were. I explained how they were big books, kind of like thick magazines, that large department stores sent to our home each year when I was a little girl.  You could order things from them through the mail.

I showed them this photo.  I told them the dolls my sister and I were holding had been ordered from a special issue of the catalogue called the Christmas Catalogue.  It was full of things you could order as gifts. 

I also told the boys the matching outfits my sister and I are wearing in the photo were made by my mother.  They couldn’t believe that when I was their age my mother sewed all our clothes on a sewing machine.

 Just before I started kindergarten in the fall of 1958 I desperately wanted a store-bought dress rather than a homemade one.

My mother let me order this dress from the catalogue.

Just for interest’s sake I looked up the Eaton’s catalogue for 1958 and found this page.  I think I can maybe even spot a dress something like mine in one of the drawings. 

Here I am wearing the dress from the catalogue at Christmas at my grandparents’ in 1958. 

I also told the boys that some people used pages from old catalogues as toilet paper in their outdoor toilets because toilet paper was too expensive.  They found that hard to believe too.

I took this photo at the Art Gallery of Ontario. It is a painting by prairie artist William Kurelek in 1976. He has depicted a person in the outhouse on a winter day. Hanging on the wall is the Eatons catalogue he is using for toilet paper.

I have been telling my grandsons stories on Face Time during the pandemic. Often I talk about things from my childhood that I think might be interesting.  The idea of catalogues certainly was something novel to them. 

Other posts……….

Shin Pads and Toilet Paper

The Olden Days

Two Stories About Grandpa