Comfort Catalog

Most everyone has a comfort food, but they also probably have a comfort activity too. Have you ever thought about this? 

The people who lived in our house before us received a great number of mail order catalogs. I am forever grateful to them. Because my comfort activity is paging through these shiny tomes that get delivered through the mail slot.

Don't misunderstand me. This activity is not about shopping (although sometimes I do get good ideas for gifts and I do admit to having a bit of a Boden addiction). But I am certainly not a shopaholic. In fact, I don't even like shopping. I do all my clothes shopping in two batches each year -- spring and fall -- and I am a woman on a mission. I spend a few weeks buying, trying on, deciding, returning... so it's done and dusted and I can back to my regular life. 

Browsing through catalogs is a different story. It's something that started young for me, perhaps with the Sears catalog. If you're American and grew up in the 80s, you might remember it too. It was a very fat and heavy book, filled with everything you could possibly imagine buying, including of course a plethora of toys. Perhaps this was the initial attraction for me, but my catalog browsing was not limited to toys. We also used to get catalogs filled with fancy baskets of food, joke items, decorations, clothes -- the works. And I loved to look through them. I would even sometimes make catalogs of my own, cutting and pasting photos from them into a handmade book, made from loose-leaf paper with construction paper for the back and cover. 

I suppose I was always going to work in publishing in one form or another.

It's amazing that even in our digital age companies still send out these catalogs. I would imagine they must be expensive to produce. But they are also effective, I'm sure, as there is something so satisfying about paging through them and seeing how the merchandise is laid out -- the image that has been created, the story that entices you to buy. Look, your living room can be this magical too!, they seem to say.

Maybe it's the fantasy of them that I like. Knowing that if I buy any of the items, my life will still be the same, but it's fun to pretend. I guess it really doesn't matter why I like paging through them. It's just good to know that I have such a cheap, easily-accessible comfort activity that picks me up when I feel down. 

What about you -- do you have a comfort activity?