As this holiday season starts off with the sad demise of yet another department store, Lord & Taylor on Fifth Avenue, I recall with gratitude the retailers of old whose emporiums played a part in my childhood Christmases.

I grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia which would become home to what was for a time the largest convocation of retail sites on the planet—King of Prussia. But the King of Prussia mall wasn’t there when I was little. We went shopping at the Valley Forge Shopping Center, a short strip of stores bordering a parking lot: a hardware store, a Sears sewing machine store where my sister Kathy and I took charm lessons (!), a five and dime, the name of which we resented because, belying its name, most things there cost far more than ten cents. Or, we went department store shopping downtown.

December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, was a holiday at Mother of Divine Providence school and a day that my sister and I looked forward to all year, the day our mother took us Christmas shopping at John Wanamaker’s—although touring, not shopping, would be the more apt description of what we did there. As our mother got the babies settled with a sitter in the morning, (we were the oldest of eight) Kathy and I would shine up our patent leathers, pull on lace anklets, don dresses and white gloves and stock our purses with essentials that our mother had taught us a lady should always carry: a comb, a handkerchief, a few dollar bills. Then, we’d slip out of the house behind her and slide in next to her on the front seat of our red and white Chevy station wagon and drive into Bridgeport to catch a (thrilling) train to the city.

If anyone reading this grew up in the Philadelphia area during Mad Men days, you no doubt recall that John Wanamaker’s wasn’t just a department store, it was a civic landmark. It had the world’s largest pipe organ in its center court (the store was an atrium where you could shop on the first floor and look up to the twelfth. To us kids it was “a donut with the hole in the middle.”) The organ became a light show each December, enthralling shoppers with brightly colored fountains, red, green and purple poles of water that spurted up and down in sync with “Frosty the Snowman” or “Rudolph” blaring from speakers.

What most enchanted my sister and me was the eighth floor where the “biggest toy department on Earth” could be viewed from a monorail. The monorail was an ingenious merchandising idea, a child-sized Hogwarts-like train that looped around on a track suspended from the ceiling so you could gaze down on the displays gleaming with Schwinn bikes and chemistry sets and stuffed animals suspended from parachutes coming out of space ships (it was the Space Age) and talking dolls and baby dolls with trunks full of clothes and other wish-items for your Santa list. The line for Santa was always long, but there was enough entertainment around you (fake snow blowing from the ceiling, those animals ejecting from space ships!) to keep you from boredom. The highlight of the day was dining with our mother in the Crystal Tea room where we’d straighten in our chairs and hold our breath, hoping the waitress wouldn’t hand us a children’s menu.

Days later, our father would come home early from work. and the whole family would pile into the station wagon and we’d drive downtown to “see Christmas” in the windows of not only John Wanamaker’s, but Strawbridge’s and Gimbels. Every store window glittered with lights and North Pole displays, and a requisite nativity scene to show shoppers that even though they were a commercial enterprise, they knew “what Christmas was about.”

I’m thrilled to be “going home” this holiday season, to read at Main Point Bookstore in Wayne. Wednesday, December 5, 7 PM. Perhaps I’ll go early to catch a glimpse of the monorail preserved in Memorial Hall in Philadelphia’s Please Touch Museum.