Mail-order Catalogs at Thanksgiving

What does gratitude mean for a modern consumer?

By: Jesse Miller

November 28, 2025

I remember paging through catalogs, using a pen to circle toys that I wanted for Christmas. It was the 80s and I wanted an action-figure set based on a cartoon which was really just an extended ad for the toys in the catalog.

Products without Context

In 1872, Aaron Montgomery Ward started the first mail-order catalog business in Chicago. Ward was able to offer low prices to customers in the region by buying in large quantity and avoiding the rent and salary costs of operating a storefront. By the beginning of the 20th century, the catalog had 1,200 pages with more than 70,000 products for sale, many of them shown with woodcut illustrations.¹

Behind this catalog was a network of relationships connecting the city and surrounding countryside. Trains took agricultural products and natural resources from rural areas to the city. For farm families, the mail-order catalogs promised access to a more modern life filled new inventions and gadgets.

Yet, according to historian William Cronon, the catalog obscured this relationship between the city and countryside. Each item was just another product to purchase, removed from the context of where it came from and who made it.

Of course, the products did come from somewhere and the extraction, production, and transportation had real consequences for the midwestern landscape. Farmers turned the prairie into fields and sent wheat, corn, and barley to Chicago’s grain elevators. Lumberjacks cut down the northern white pines and floated them to the lumberyards. Feedlot farmers sent their cattle and hogs on trains to the Union Stock Yards.

Our economy now is even more global, and the sources even more obscured. We purchase an item from Amazon, but have little sense of where it came from and how its production impacted humans and the environment.²

Creation is a Gift

I don’t think that knowing where our stuff comes from will necessarily save plants, animals, and minerals from overuse. Saving something involves us agreeing, in some way, that it’s worth saving.

As Christians, we might consider the difference between “nature” and “creation.” In Laudato Si, Pope Francis wrote:

“Nature is usually seen as a system which can be studied, understood and controlled, whereas creation can only be understood as a gift from the outstretched hand of the Father of all, and as a reality illuminated by the love which calls us together into universal communion.”³

When we see creation as a gift, that has implications for how we relate to our stuff and how we shape our economy.

Potawatomi botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about the difference between a commodity and a gift by using the example of socks purchased from a store compared to those knitted by a grandmother. “I don’t write a thank-you note to JCPenny,” she writes. A gift, on the other hand, “changes everything.” Kimmerer writes:

“A gift creates ongoing relationship. I will write a thank-you note [for the knitted socks]. I will take good care of them and if I am a very gracious grandchild I’ll wear them when she visits even if I don’t like them.”⁴

We are told everything is a commodity, and that’s a story we can live by. But we can also perceive the world as a gift. Kimmerer writes:

“One of these stories opens the way to living in gratitude and amazement at the richness and generosity of the world. One of these stories asks us to bestow our own gifts in kind, to celebrate our kinship with the world. We can choose. If all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow. When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy we become.”

Gifts Near and Far

We don’t live as close to the land as the Native American populations that cared for our region for thousands of years.⁵ It’s difficult for us to see that our stuff ultimately comes from God’s good creation, whether that’s plastic made out of petroleum formed from prehistoric life, cotton sent to a sweatshop, or a battery from mined lithium. Yet, everything comes from somewhere.

How can we lessen our burden on the earth—watersheds both near and far?

How can we receive the gifts that sustain us while lamenting the harm that comes from our global economy?

What gifts can we offer? How can we build local economies and support fair trade arrangements that honor labor and creation?

A few more things:

• “Small Is Beautiful—But It’s Not Enough”. This essay, from journalist Julia Rehmeyer’s Substack, is a good complement to what I wrote here. “The world needs less consumerism, yes, but it also needs more power— clean power, built quickly, at scale.”

• “COP-tastrophe: How the COP of Implementation, Truth, Forests, and Indigenous Peoples Failed on All Counts.” From Drilled: “Throughout COP30, the scientific community had repeatedly and clearly emphasized the threat posed by a failure to act. Though the process did secure more scrutiny of fossil fuel producers, some money for forests and adaptation, and a new emphasis on trade and implementation, it only inched towards working through the collective phase out of oil, gas and coal. By its end, COP30 in Belém failed to secure any new agreement on ending the fossil fuel age, forcing the world to wait yet another year to see if global leaders will ever make good on their Paris promises.”

• “‘I’m afraid for our children’: living with the climate crisis in the Philippines – in pictures.” A photo essay from the Guardian.

• “Ridgeville Park board votes to discuss urban farm at Elks Park.” From the RoundTable: “The urban farm would produce up to 25,000 pounds a year of food, according to Evanston Grows, all of which would be donated to those who are burdened by food costs.”

• “What Chicago’s Boulevards Reveal about Community, Climate Change and Inequality.” From Inside Climate News: “Biking the length of Chicago’s boulevard system reveals how climate and inequality intertwine on every stretch of road. Some neighborhoods cool under dense shade; others bake on cracked concrete. Yet the idea behind the boulevards still holds power—a continuous green network meant to connect people and protect the city from heat and floods.”

1

I’m getting most of this section is from William Cronon’s book Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West.

2

We should note that consumption in general is not equal. North Americans consume much more than those in the Global South. And a small minority of very wealthy people consume an absurd amount of resources.

3

Laudato Si’

4

These quotes are from the chapter about strawberries in Braiding Sweetgrass, but she expands on some of the ideas in The Serviceberry.

5

There are many ways we can attempt to live closer to the land. In Goatwalking, Quaker Jim Corbett recommended that we spend at least a week in the wild, with little gear or plans: “To be at home in wildlands, one must accept and share life as a gift that is unearned and unowned. When we cease to work at taming the Creation and learn to accept life as a gift, a way opens for us to become active participants in an ancient exodus out of idolatry and bondage—a pilgrimage that continues to be conceived and born in wilderness.”