Christmas shopping definitely isn't what it once was.

When my children were younger, we used to pick a Saturday or Sunday in early December. Then we would bundle up, battle the traffic, find a parking space and then struggle through the crowds in that holiest of American holies -- the shopping mall.

It wasn't always that way. In fact, when I was a kid  myself back in the Pleistocene Era, there were no shopping malls. Even the idea of shopping <em>centers</em> in the suburbs was relatively new. Back in the day -- and I mean the 1950s -- most of the shopping still took place at large downtown department stores. And if you lived anywhere near central Ohio, the granddaddy of all the department stores was Lazarus in downtown Columbus.

Back then, department stores sold almost everything, from furniture to record albums, from clothing to toys. Go into a Macy's or a Nordstrom's today and you won't find much of anything you don't wear -- clothes, jewelry, makeup, etc. One thing I remember about the Columbus Lazarus was that it had a good-sized room with pay telephones and chairs all around the walls, and chairs and benches in the middle for people to sit and relax.

I remember that the sixth floor was the toy department. Toys only occupied part of the sixth floor most of the year, but from Thanksgiving until Christmas -- the Christmas shopping season in those days -- the department expanded to cover three times as much space.

To kids of 8 or 9, it seemed almost magical.

[caption id="attachment_188" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Lazarus in Columbus, Ohio"]<img class="size-medium wp-image-188" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/800px-Lazarus_downtown_05-300x224.jpg" alt="Lazarus in Columbus, Ohio" width="300" height="224" />[/caption]

I remember reading in several of Bob Greene's books -- he's two or three years older than I am -- of trips downtown to Lazarus to buy the new Beatles album, or the time he purchased a pair of slacks and his first guitar.

I didn't live in Columbus. We were 50 or 60 miles away in a suburb north of Dayton, but I remember trips to the state capital to shop at Lazarus. It was a bigger deal in those days -- Interstate 70 didn't open between Dayton and Columbus until the summer of 1962, so 50 or 60 miles could take as long as an hour and a half.

It was always worth it, though. Maybe it was just the perspective of a young boy, but Lazarus always seemed special to me. In fact, I can only think of two department stores that have filled me with the same sense of awe.

One was the original Macy's on 34th Street in New York City. I remember getting off an elevator on one floor there in 1995 and seeing nothing but grand pianos. <em>That</em> was impressive.

The other is a place I've visited two or three times now -- Harrod's in London. I'm pretty sure Harrod's is bigger and has a wider selection of merchandise than Macy's or Lazarus ever did. It probably had to be to impress a guy on the far side of middle age, a guy whose sense of wonder is a lot more difficult to impress.

I'm sure it would be fun to do my Christmas shopping at Harrod's someday, a lot more fun than I had tonight when I visited Amazon.com, made a few searches and clicks and took care of about 50 percent of my shopping without ever leaving my chair.

I'm not sure life is meant to be <em>that</em> easy.