Neil the Frog: A Collector's Guide to Sears' Frog Family Ceramicware

By Matthew Partsch · Owl and Twig Vintage · October 11, 2026

On page 1026 of the 1975 Sears Wish Book, a green frog sits cross-legged on a yellow water lily, gazing up at nothing in particular from the side of a cookie jar. Sears never gave him a name. Half a century later, everyone calls him Neil.

The Wish Book page

On October 10 we came home from a flea market in Oakland County, Michigan, with a big green frog cookie jar under one arm, and the first thing we did was go looking for his family. They turned up in our copy of the 1975 Sears Christmas Wish Book, a full spread of pale green under the heading "Frog Family Ceramicware," with a line beneath promising matching cookware and accessories.

The Frog Family cookie jar holds the left side of the page, photographed nearly life size. Around it Sears arranged the rest of the household: a wall clock that ran on a "C" battery, a mug tree with four 10-ounce mugs on a wrought-iron stand, a frog bank, a napkin holder, a sugar and creamer, flower-shaped salt and pepper shakers, a second pair sized for the stove, a 6-inch tile trivet on a black cast-iron base, and a hanging planter on 23 inches of gold-finished chain. The catalog describes the first eleven items in one sentence: embossed characters on high-glazed, hand-decorated ceramicware, green, yellow and black on a white background. Japan.

Then Sears kept going. A seven-piece set of porcelain-coated steel cookware. Plastic lacquerware canisters, also from Japan. A hardwood cutting board on a leather thong. A cork bulletin board, an enameled bread box, a white metal sprinkling can and a two-quart teakettle. Rolls of Marvalon self-adhesive covering, sold by the yard, so the frogs could climb the shelf liner too. And at the bottom right, the grand finale: an enameled steel five-in-one cabinet holding four canisters, a bread box with a magnetic latch and a cutting board.

Twenty numbered items in all. A kitchen could go frog from the floor up.

Why collectors call him Neil

The catalog copy says frog family and nothing more. The name Neil belongs to the people who kept him. It appears on nearly every listing today, in the item specifics on eBay and in the titles on Chairish, but no Sears page, box or label we have seen uses it. Where the name started is not on record. Treat it as a collector's nickname that stuck.

The dating needs the same care. Sellers usually date the pieces to 1976 through 1978, reading the year off the mark on the base, and Chairish dates a canister pair to around 1977 or 1978. The Wish Book on our desk puts the full line in Sears' hands for Christmas 1975. A 1976 date on a base marks a year the piece was made, not the year the frog arrived.

Neil also kept company. Sears sold other Japanese ceramic lines in the same years, Merry Mushroom the best known among them, and a Vermont dealer describes Sears' pioneer-lady mugs as the same lightweight ceramic as Neil and Merry Mushroom. Collectors who chase one usually end up owning a piece of the other.

And he went to the movies. A site devoted to annotating Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) frame by frame has catalogued Frog Family pieces in the Torrances' scenes, noting that the cross-legged frog on his lotus looks a good deal like a seated Buddha. For a frog bought to brighten a kitchen, the Overlook Hotel is an odd place to end up.

The catalog cookie jar

The white cookie jar is the centerpiece of the 1975 page, and Sears priced it like one, at about twelve dollars. The catalog gives it 10 inches of height and four pounds of shipping weight, under catalog number 11G8269C. The frog sits embossed on the side, perched on his lily with a spray of leaves and buds rising around him, and the lid curls over the top like a lily pad.

Resellers often list the large canister and the cookie jar interchangeably, and measurements in listings run from 9 to 10½ inches. Measure with the lid on, compare the result against the catalog's 10 inches, and check whether you are holding a jar sold alone or the tallest member of the four-piece canister set, which Sears sized from 6 to 10 inches.

The big green frog

The dealer's table in Oakland County showed how far the frog has traveled from his catalog page. Along the front stood four full-figure frog cookie jars, each a single squat frog in deep olive glaze with white goggle eyes, sitting with his hands on his knees, his head lifting off as the lid. One of them is now ours.

No jar like him appears on the 1975 page. He shares the goggle-eyed face of the white line, and sellers list him as Neil and as Sears without hesitation. Two sold on eBay in September 2025, one for $84.99 and one for $67.49. The second seller noted a fair amount of crazing, worst on the head, which matches what the olive glaze tends to do with age. The first listed its jar as "906 USA," a mark that would put it in an American pottery rather than a Japanese one. That is the question to settle before calling any big green frog a Sears piece: turn him over and read what the base says.

Beside the green frogs sat eight of the white Frog Family pieces in graduated sizes. Their lids are embossed lily pads with a single yellow blossom, and each carries a small green frog as its knob, some sitting upright, others sprawled on their stomachs with their chins in their hands. On the walls below, the frog peers out from his lotus through a thicket of leaves.

One had a wide opening cut in its front and a gold-finished chain coiled beside it. That was the hanging planter, item 11 on the Wish Book page, still holding on to its chain fifty years later.

Four big frogs. Eight small ones. One table.

How to tell a real one

• Turn it over. Genuine white Frog Family pieces carry a Sears, Roebuck and Co. mark with a mid-1970s date and a Japan origin. Some still wear a paper sticker.
• Read the base on a green figural jar before believing the listing. A Japan mark ties it to the Sears import line; a USA mark points to an American maker.
• Feel the weight. Collectors describe the Sears Japanese lines as lightweight ceramic, lighter than American pottery of the same size.
• Look for the relief. The frog and his lily are embossed and then hand-painted, so the color sits on raised surfaces, and the brushwork varies from piece to piece.
• Check the palette. Green frog, yellow lily, black detail on a glossy white ground. Other colors suggest another maker borrowing the idea.
• Inspect the stress points: lid rims, the tips of the lily petals and the little frog knob on the lid, which are the first places to chip.
• Look for crazing, the fine network of cracks in the glaze, which is common on fifty-year-old ceramic and lowers the price.
• Expect missing parts. Salt and pepper shakers lose their plastic stoppers, hanging planters lose their chains, and loose lids get matched to the wrong canisters.

What Neil sells for

Prices for the Frog Family run low for the common pieces and climb for the scarce ones. Several of the numbers below are asking prices, and a seller's tag is not a sale.

The pattern holds across the market. Singles sell for the price of a lunch, and completeness drives value: original lids, intact stoppers and a full run of canisters. The big green cookie jar sits at the top of the common pieces, on size and on personality. The clock, the bank and the steel cabinet turn up far less often, and they are what keeps a Frog Family collector checking listings.

Caring for it

Wash by hand in warm water with mild soap, and keep it out of the dishwasher, which dulls hand-painted color. Avoid soaking a crazed piece, since water works into the cracks and stains the body underneath. Line the cookie jar with a food-safe bag if you plan to use it; the glaze is fifty years old and its formula is not on record. Lift a figural jar by the body, never the head. A lid riding loose is how most of them break.

For more on the marks found under Japanese export ceramics, see our guide to Nippon, Japan and Occupied Japan marks.

Sears sold him as part of a family. The families who kept him gave him a name.