>Some of us grew up in the 60s and 70s when kids were still able to be kids.
That is the truth.
Lazarus used to cover the entire front of the store with a six-story Christmas tree done in lights. Even the little stores around here turned unused space into Toyland.
I've thought a lot about this, though: when we were kids, the Christmas decorations went up after Thanksgiving. That's also when we started practicing for school pageants and helping our moms bake. When we got to go to the department stores, we got to see Santa and walk through the toy department, but if you look at one of those old buildings and realize what we were looking at, no wonder we didn't have as many meltdowns as you see now. The G.C. Murphy Toyland looked huge. It was actually two aisles in a store the size of a modern Family Dollar/Dollar General. The book "department" was the size of a large home bookshelf. There were maybe three or four kinds of large trucks in playsets, plus a dozen or so kinds of smaller ones. If there were three or four large dolls with furniture and such, and a dozen small ones, that was still enough to set off Christmas dreaming. We didn't have miles of confusing things to choose from, and the toys didn't do things for us. When it came to trains, I think our Murphy's and Grant's had a couple of large HO sets, a couple of basic ones, and maybe a Marx set. (By the time I got around, most Lionel was at Heil's Bike Shop or Cooey-Bentz in Wheeling.) Sometimes fewer choices make for happier kids.
That's also why so many of us remember being allowed to wander around and look at toys When there were only a couple of aisles, our parents always knew where we were.
