Reflections of Christmas past

Happy holidays to all who follow this blog! 

As my writings indicate, the autumn and early winter have always held a certain degree of magic for me because they were the beginning of "leather weather".  Through much of my childhood and early adult life I anticipated seeing fashionable women button up in leather coats as it grew cold outside.

A JCPenney Christmas catalog arrived in the mail in early September.  I would anxiously flip though it to the women's outerwear section in high-hopes of discovering a full-page advertisement for a ladies long leather coat.  And during the 1990s it rarely disappointed.

This was only part of the joy heralded by the season, though.  Mail order catalogs came regularly advertising women's leather coats.  Everybody still got newspapers in those days before the Internet, and they were stuffed with ads from department stores.  Every day when I got home from class or work I would scour these ads, and much to my delight they often contained images like these.

Even black-and-white ads offered glimpses of ladies in leather coats, including this one from 1991 which is one of my all-time favorites.

Thanksgiving celebrated on the last Thursday of November meant that the newspaper would be tremendously thick, packed full of Christmas sales for the retail phenomenon known as Black Friday.  What better gift could a man buy a woman for Christmas than a luxurious long leather coat?  These three pictures were from the same Macy's ad on Thanksgiving 1995.  

As the holiday season got into full swing the visions of ladies in leather coats were almost daily.

Christmas shopping was done almost entirely at malls; hours and hours spent driving all over town and walking through stores.  And of course part of the fun of the season was that you got to see women in long leather coats like these carrying their bags full of holiday treasures in the aisles and parking lots.  

Back then my experience around women wearing leather coats was limited almost entirely to these brief public encounters.  One notable exception was when my cousin, twenty years my senior, brought his girlfriend to a family Christmas party.  She was an attractive woman, probably about forty years old with dark hair cut in the popular short style.  She arrived buttoned in an ankle length coat of black lambskin.  I was nineteen or twenty most likely and certainly enjoyed getting the awkward hug from her in that supple leather coat, which I later admired for a few furtive seconds where it lay with the other coats on a bed.

Some of the girls in my college and graduate training wore black leather coats, mostly of the popular four-button three-quarter length style.  A good friend of mine showed up at a dinner party in of these coats one time around New Years Eve.  She was a pretty girl and I was thrilled to see her shine in a sleek leather coat, although I don't think I ever saw her wear it again.

Once Christmas was over the Winter clearance sales would begin and ads like this would appear.

Such was my young adult life through the 1990s until 2003, during which the long leather coat simultaneously evolved into the spectacular maxi-coat which I bought in 2004 for the beautiful woman who is now my wife.  Much has changed since then.  Christmas catalogs have vanished and malls are going extinct as online shopping makes their purpose obsolete.  Long leather coats dwindled almost out of existence in popular fashion over the past decade, and you can scarcely find one offered except by extremely high-end retailers.  To see a lady in a sleek leather coat is extraordinarily rare now.  Extremely elegant women still wear them, though, and I am lucky to be married to such a woman.  I no longer need to take vicarious pleasure in holiday advertisements of ladies in leather coats.  Christmas comes to me now with the embrace of my gorgeous wife wrapped up in her long lambskin coat.  She is the greatest gift I ever received.