• By ED CULLEN
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Nov 29, 2009 - Page: 1D

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Leafing through the pages of the Lillian Vernon catalog is to recall the interminable  days that led to Christmas when I was in high school.

We weren’t children anymore so Christmas no longer meant the anticipation of some much-wanted toy. The holiday meant a break in a rigorous school year that would resume with a vengeance in less than two weeks.

In a mist of hormones and hair tonic, we boys stuck our legs in wool trousers before pulling on wool sweaters and jamming feet into wool socks to “go out.”

Several megatons of static electricity helped prevent unwanted pregnancies. Even dancing required grounding with heavy copper wire or thick, rubber-soled shoes.

Parties seemed always to be at someone’s house deep in the woods at the end of driveways that began with  aluminum gates and a cattle guard.

My world was Alexandria and the heart of darkness of the far reaches of Rapides Parish where people hung gutted deer from front yard trees as signs of status.

“Got mine! You got yours, yet?”

We passed long winter afternoons waiting for the sun to go down and friends with cars to pick us up. A honking horn was an invitation to join other warm, fragrant bodies clad in itchy wool. We were so happy to be going nowhere.

Icy blasts of air through open car windows made breathing possible in an atmosphere that was 10 percent oxygen, 10 percent carbon dioxide and 80 percent Old Spice.

But, first, there were the long afternoons.

My aunt got the Lillian Vernon catalog, a rich offering of 100 percent cotton “footlets” with pompon heels, commode seat warmers, monogrammed towels, soaps in the shapes of animals, black shoes that may have been a seminary’s overstock, candles and women in brassieres, half slips and fluffy mules (red or blue) for the lady lounging in split-level Babylon.

On these late fall afternoons, the gift catalogs that land in my mailbox fill me with a longing for Hansel and Gretel trivets, vertical towel racks, artificial Christmas trees with rotating color wheels, inflatable garden owls, clocks that sound the hour in bird calls and long-handled devices to scrape snow from a car’s windshield — along with the windshield if used in the Deep South.

I would order something from a fall catalog — maybe a “Rain or Shine, Our German ‘Weather Haus’” — if it would do for me what Lillian Vernon once did.