© Kathy Duncan, 2024
My 92-year-old mother is a doll collector, so it's no surprise that I love dolls and that my tastes run more toward brown-eyed covered wagon china head dolls than toward Barbies.
For Christmas this year, I gave my mother two doll reference books - one on Shirley Temple dolls and collectibles and one on Effanbee dolls. I'd bought some irresistibly pretty wrapping with gobs of glitter, which, of course, was a mistake.
She opened the Shirley Temple book first. It has lots of color pictures - in other words, eye candy. As she worked on opening the second book, with glitter shedding off on her pants, she said, "You know, I always thought I had a Shirley Temple doll, but then I became a doll collector and learned that she was not a Shirley Temple doll at all." As a child, my mother told me repeatedly that Santa brought her a Shirley Temple doll one Christmas. I guess my depression-era grandparents could only afford a Shirley Temple look-alike.
But Mom wasn't finished, "One Christmas I wore out the Christmas catalog looking at a doll I really wanted. I looked at that catalog until it fell apart. When Christmas came, there was that doll under the tree. I was so happy. I played with her all morning. Then I decided to introduce her to my Shirley Temple doll. I ran into my room, and my doll was gone. Mother had made a dress for her just like the one on the doll in the catalog and put her under the tree."
I thought of my grandmother slipping around to get the materials to make that dress and then staying up late at night after my mother was asleep to work on it. And I thought of a little girl who was really much too young to know just how bad things were in the 1930s.
Shortly after she opened her presents, we headed out to Mom's favorite Mexican food restaurant. Her jeans sparkling with Christmas glitter.
Precious story.
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