(FORTUNE Magazine) – Christmas hurtles toward us at its usual menacing pace, and in self-defense I reach for the catalogues that pile up beneath my mailbox. As I leaf through them I have begun to notice a strange phenomenon: Beatlechic.

I first saw it in a catalogue called "Signals," "for fans and friends of public television." In itself the catalogue is an interesting cultural artifact, a perfect distillation of the middlebrow pretensions that bind together the fans of PBS. For public TV is, as it constantly reminds us, "television worth watching," or, as I prefer to think of it, "TV for people who pretend to hate TV." "Signals" specializes in the twin "-philias" of PBS: Anglo- and biblio-. There are I BUY BOOKS SHIRTS and I LOVE BOOKS shirts, imprinted with portraits of great authors like Thackeray, who are so much easier to wear than to read. (Alas, no I'D RATHER BE READING BORGES bumper stickers.) And there are British pub glasses and Dickensian outdoor furniture and CDs with titles like Olde English Christmas.

And then, on page 41, there are the Beatles--the only rock & roll band so honored. You could even think of them as the Official Rock Band of Public Television. For $270 you can get a lithograph of a Beatles album cover, in a tasteful chestnut frame. And for $32.50 you can get a tie besplattered with the chaotic black-and-white cover design of the album Revolver. Obla-di, Obla-da, Obla-gag me.

As you might have noticed, Christmas makes me grouchy, so I am perhaps not in the best humor to appraise the meaning of Beatlechic. But I do know its dimensions are large, and the evidence goes beyond the huge sales of the new Beatles Anthology 3 CD or the ten-hour Anthology video ($159). Every day a new tony catalogue arrives, offering yet another piece of Fab Four merchandise: more lithographs, cuff links, tapestries, silk vests, wristwatches, even replicas in brass of a ticket to the Beatles concert at Carnegie Hall. Many of these are in questionable taste. Did you know that you can get a Ringo dinner plate, much of it taken up by the fourth Beatle's enormous grin? The recipient of this gift will thus be able to scrape meat loaf from the teeth of the world's luckiest drummer before putting it in his own mouth. Now, I like Ringo as much as the next man, but...

The Ringo plate comes in different sizes and prices, from a modest $15 for a 34-inch miniplate to $1,000 for an "autographed platinum-banded plate," with figurine. (By the way, the best way to see this stuff in one swoop is to order a catalogue by calling 1-800-BEATLES.) If you think Ringo's platinum plate is overpriced, you may think the same of the $450 leather-bound edition of George Harrison's CD Live in Japan, 1991. And I suppose you won't be buying the leather-bound biography of Stuart Sutcliffe, a boyhood friend of the Beatles' who performed with them briefly before his death in 1962. The bio can be yours for $380.

But if you're not buying this stuff--and please tell me you aren't--who is? One should trust the market in these matters, of course, and assume the price reflects the relationship between supply and demand. There is a long history of Beatles marketing, after all. As a fifth-grader in 1965, I myself saved for weeks to buy a Beatles lunch box. With my neighborhood pals I traded Beatles cards and sat through endless matinees of Help! and A Hard Day's Night. Whenever rumors of a new Beatles album circulated, we haunted the local record shop until the crates were unpacked, whereupon we pooled resources to buy a communal copy. For preteens the expense wasn't inconsiderable. And our parents thought we were nuts.

And what would they think now--now that we're no longer paying $2.99 for Revolver but $450 for a rasping, necrotic George, live in Japan? I remember Beatlemania--that is, the first Beatlemania--with great fondness, but in looking back I remember something else too. Chronologically, the Big Band era was as distant from the late 1960s as the Beatles are to the late 1990s, and yet none of our parents were buying Glenn Miller throw rugs or Andrews Sisters earrings or designer lamp stands in the shape of Artie Shaw's clarinet. I'm sure I'd remember if they had.

What grips us this Yuletide, then, is another outbreak of that most unprecedented of modern diseases: baby-boomer nostalgia. When I first glanced at those Revolver ties in the PBS catalogue, I began to daydream and imagined the target demographic for Beatlechic. I see a fellow rapidly sliding into his 40s or beyond, just starting to run to fat, and for the first time in his life given to wistfulness. As Masterpiece Theatre murmurs quietly on a Sunday night his mind drifts back to the posters on his dorm room wall, and he hears the Beatles on the record player, and he sees the co-eds of 1972 bouncing across the quad--so near yet so out of reach! Monday morning comes and with the dreamy scent of patchouli still wafting about him he reaches for that Revolver tie: a statement that he has yet to be claimed by the bourgeoisie, that his heart belongs to the Beatles and not to Barrons.

Is there a middle-aged man among us who doesn't know the feeling? But my daydream ends happily. For at last he reaches beyond the silly tie smeared with an album cover from another life, and he straps on the foulard from Brooks Brothers. And hopes his kids buy him another just like it for Christmas.