Sometimes I know I am the kind of consumer marketing executives love, and this is no exception

I know I said I love the internet for holiday shopping, but I forgot to mention the one little thing that makes internet shopping even better, the peanut butter to the internet's jelly, if you will, and that is catalogs.

My parents get a lot of catalogs, and this is the prime catalog season. Every December the last few years I'd start flipping through the Winter edition of Oriental Trading and suddenly I would have been looking at kitchy Christmas gifts for an hour. I never realized that those catalogs I was reading? They were just the tail end of the mailbox bombardment my family had been experiencing since October.

I don't know why I love them so much. Maybe it's the glossy pages, maybe it's the ridiculous things I'd never let anyone see me looking at in an actual store. Remote control racing grannies? Dog-shaped bars of soap? A miniature model of the General Lee? T-shirts with a singing cat and the words"Oh Sole Meow"? There's something for every mood. If I want more t-shirts with bad puns, I've got The Music Stand. Science gadgets? The Discovery Store. Greeting cards that cost $17.00 apiece? The Museum of Modern Art. An I Love Lucy lunchbox? Betty's Attic.

And if I actually found a gift I thought someone would like, I could go order it online. It's amazing. That doesn't happen very often, but that isn't going to stop me from being excited to check the mail everyday.