I’m not sorry to see the holidays in the rear-view mirror, but I will miss the season’s mail-order catalogs.

Along about September, my mailbox began to fill with those ever-smiling, smartly dressed families. These folks live in spacious, well-appointed homes and they have everything, absolutely everything: puppies on monogrammed dog beds, log-filled fireplaces, backyard ski hills, attractive multi-generational gatherings in which no one is groping anyone else’s spouse or dropping the good china.

Yet they aren’t snobbish, you can tell. These are people who are just grateful to be living in a time and place when every man, woman, and child is entitled to a full wardrobe of plush flannel sleepwear. It makes sense. No one sleeping in one of those polished oak sleigh-beds would be caught dead in a ratty blue t-shirt from the Kerry campaign.

These folks have drawstring sweatpants—with the original drawstrings—that are inevitably slimming. Their slippers match their robes. There are never any white splotches on the front of those terrycloth robes from errant toothpaste spittle.

A lot of the middle-aged women are confident enough to let their hair go gray, and you have to admire that. We could all learn something from these gals. Despite their lack of age-fighting salon time, not one of their chisel-featured men ever seems to have a much-younger partner hanging on his arm, or a passel of second-round kids who will be in junior high when he is 80.

The kids who do show up in these tableaux are dazzling. Not one needs cripplingly expensive orthodontia. It’s hard to know for sure, but it doesn’t seem likely that any of them have head lice.

The catalogs don’t stop coming, of course. But once the holiday season is over, things just aren’t the same. People spend less time at home. Puppies grow into dogs. Flannel sleepwear gives way to brushed pima cotton. It’s just a few weeks until the bathing-suit catalogs come out.

Now there’s a bunch of shallow phonies. Don’t even get me started.