Before it was discontinued in 2011, Sears mailed out these wonderful tomes of literature in August or September called the Christmas Wishbook.

This was long before the days of Google and Amazon. We didn’t scroll through screens. We drooled over real, live paper pages in actual thick magazines that the mail lady had jammed into our mailbox.

We knew that somewhere past the dress shirts, pajamas and socks (Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, yes, but PLEASE, no more stupid socks!) were dozens of pages filled with the most wonderful selection of toys.

We boys studied the Wishbook in a way we never did our social studies or history textbooks. By mid-October, not only had we circled the items we most wanted Mom and Dad to notice, we took detailed notes with names, descriptions, options and page numbers.

We knew better than to include the prices on the list. That would be the only column Mom and Dad would see, and our dreams immediately would be dashed:

“They want $4.99 for THAT? They must be crazy. You boys must be crazy if you think I’m spending $4.99 on a hunk of plastic that’ll snap apart if you sneeze in its direction.

Do you know how many times I can fill the car’s gas tank on $4.99?”

Back in those days, $4.99 bought a LOT of gasoline.

Plus, if we went to a fancy gas station, it might even carry a balsa wood airplane for 10 cents.

“Ten cents! I’m not paying a whole dime for a flimsy shaving of wood so that you boys can break it before we get out of the parking lot.”

Those were tough times. But with a Sears Christmas Wishbook, you could DREAM!

My wish was to hold one of those old-fashioned Wishbooks again.

Then it happened. An actual mailman delivered a package from my buddy Tom. Inside, I found a book titled “Boys’ Toys of the Fifties and Sixties.” Edited by Thomas W. Holland, its pages from the Sears Christmas Wishbooks from 1950 through 1969.

I don’t know what happened the rest of the day because I was busy flipping through the pages and the years.

Did you know that in 1952, you could order a chemistry set with “real uranium ore” and “radioactive screen.”

That’s right, back in the old days, we kids were encouraged to play with danger.

One of the pages showed a basic woodburning set for $1.82 or the 52-piece giant edition for $6.98. I remember when I received a woodburning kit for Christmas. This is a pen that, when you plug it in, becomes so hot that it scorches wood. You were supposed to burn pictures into chunks of wood, but you could also give yourself unintended tattoos or burn down the house. Toys back then were awesome!

The 1969 pages featured Incredible Edibles for $7.79 (bake your gummies). But back then, I remember being fixated on G.I. Joe’s sea sled ($5.99, plus two packs of D batteries for 36 cents each), or his lunar module for $9.49.

Both were deemed way too expensive.

In 1965, a kid could get the complete James Bond adventure set for $9.99. It came with 10 3.25-inch figures from all four of the Bond films, plus things like M’s office, Dr. No’s lab and Goldfinger’s laser machine.

Please return me to those thrilling days of yesteryear when I could whine for a Lone Ranger cap gun with mask and holster, or — folks, it wasn’t just a goofy thing invented for a movie — a Daisy Red Ryder 1,000 BB repeater rifle with 2X scope for $6.95 in 1950.

And no, as far as I know, no one ever lost an eye from a BB gun. What we lost was our youth, which I visited again in these marvelous pages of the Sears Christmas Wishbooks.

Now, if only I could fill up the gas tank again with less than five bucks…

Dream with the geezer at burton.w.cole@gmail.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.