Every generation knows its own customs and traditions. It has always been true.

I can’t help but feel a little nostalgic as I see kids and families wait for Christmas these days — with holiday ads bombarding them from every corner about expensive electronics and toys that can be delivered immediately, with no waiting.

But the children of the 1960s and ’70s (and earlier) knew the slow, agonizing wait for a much less complicated Christmas. We knew because we had to first wait for the kingpin of all pre-holiday artifacts — the Sears toy catalog.

It would arrive in our farm mailbox out in the middle of Nowheresville … and when it arrived, it could just as well have been declared a national holiday once we actually saw it. The catalog was the highly-anticipated post-Halloween crown jewel for every single kid. It was big; it was full; and it had the Christmas goods. When it came, we could hardly imagine what would be in it. But we knew it would be wondrous and magical — and it rarely disappointed.

We would rifle through the pages at first like circus monkeys gone wild, devouring what was on each page as we imagined actually having any of those toys. The girls salivated over the pages of dolls and girlie toys, while our brothers drooled over the farm machinery and boy toys. And just like young Ralphie did, my brothers may have also heard echoes from Mom telling them they could ‘shoot their eye out’ as they combed through the BB gun section.

Mom must have loved it because it kept us all entertained for days at a time.

As we wore out pencils circling all the things we thought we needed, it either made Christmas shopping for us kids easier or harder — knowing that when you’re trying to pay for land and keep a farming operation and a family of nine going, there isn’t all that much extra.

Being oblivious to reality, none of us kids knew then what a chore it had to have been for our parents to try to fulfill our Christmas dreams with the money they had. Even when farming was really good as it was then, it still took a lot of cash to keep the magic of Christmas alive. After all, no one wants to spoil the magic, because it’s sad when it’s gone.

To be honest, I don’t remember if anything I ever got was circled in that catalog-to-end-all-catalogs. Our parents probably couldn’t even see what was on the pages anymore after we slobbered all over them in gleeful anticipation of what could await us on Christmas morning.

Still, when the time came for each of us to know the reality of Christmas, Mom told us there would be three things under the tree for us — something we needed, something we wanted, and a surprise. For our family, that was 21 gifts just to be finished shopping for the kids. I can barely even imagine calculating the time all of that took, let alone the cold, hard cash.

I saw a photo on social media recently that showed a grouping of an apple, orange, peanuts in the shell and a couple of hard candies/gum. The caption said, “If you understand this, you’re old.” Well, I did understand it; and what a great memory that picture resurrected.

When times were a little simpler, Santa would visit our town every December, arriving on a hayrack — as Santa did then in Midwestern farming communities. Following a toy raffle on main street, every child could reach up to the hayrack and receive a brown paper bag from Santa. Inside that bag were all of those things — and it was fun to receive that bag — even if there may have been some horse trading that went on with the fruit, just because we were kids.

Christmas held several brands of anticipation. The Sears toy catalog and a trip to Sioux City as a family to get a Christmas tree started us off. Then there was Santa arriving in town, squeals of excited impatience as tinsel was untangled and placed on the tree, and homemade Christmas goodies under our noses. No wonder Mom used to watch for two-legged Christmas “mice” wandering the house, searching for Christmas gloriousness that might bear our names.

On the other hand, Mom would probably have rather been on the lookout for signs of that kind of mice rather than the four-legged kind, which she did all year long out on the farm.

There was nothing in the Sears toy catalog that would help her with that.

Karen Schwaller writes from her grain and livestock farm near Milford, Iowa. She can be reached at kschwaller@evertek.net