Nevah Mind
First Blog

All I Want for Christmas

        With only  two weeks until Christmas, the papers are loaded with circulars and sales fliers and weigh as much as a toddler with a soggy diaper. My husband and I  divvy up the weekend papers quickly – he takes the front section, week in review, business, classified, and auto, while I am the comics, local insert, travel, magazine, and book review. The sales inserts sit untouched until the kids get up and then they dive into the paper pile at the end of the bed and pull out the glossy, full color fliers for toys, sports, and clothes, depending on the sex and age of aforesaid child. And even though they’ve outgrown the toy catalogs, Mystery Man and the Little One still fight over them, hoarding them in their room. They all used to read them voraciously and circle and annotate the items that they wanted on their Santa list.
     I remember when the Christmas Sears catalog was delivered and having a fit waiting for everyone else to look at it so I could obsess over the toys and dolls. My fingers would be grimy from the newsprint that blurred under my sweaty hands as I whipped through the pages featuring washing machines, vacuums, and long underwear to get to the land of inexpressible joy, the toy section. The days after the Sears catalog was delivered were days of extreme secrecy while we hid ourselves in closets and locked rooms in order to pore over the Easy Bake Ovens and the baby dolls that wet and said “mama”.

    Iconic Christmas gifts. We all have them in our memory.  I remember receiving a huge, metal paint set that contained about 100 watercolor pans. Another time it was the giant box of Crayolas, redolent of wax and pigment, and a thick pad for coloring - remember those rough newsprint pads where you had to go around the pulp bits in the paper? Another year it was my first set of hardcover books - The Five Little Peppers and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
    And then there were Barbies.  Yes, Barbie dolls.  I know the rap - they are so unrealistic, they create unrealistic body images, they are terrible role models for little girls who yearned for giant boobs, impossibly large breasts (not anymore) and tiny feet permanently arched (which would hurt like hell, no?)
    Blah, blah, blah.
    I am old enough to say I grew up with Barbie dolls and played with them constantly. Barbie had no deleterious effect on me. In the 60's, Barbie dolls were The Big Thing. As a girl, you had limited choices in terms of your toy inventory: baby dolls, board games, bikes, and roller skates. The latter two were great but were of Little use when the temperature went below forty degrees, which was from November until April.  We had lots of board games, but they required someone to play with, and I had a lot of time on my hands by myself. And baby dolls  pretty much lost their appeal after my attention getting little sisters were born.
    Barbie filled the niche between child and teen, a niche we didn't even know existed back then. The words  "adolescent" or "prepubescent" weren’t even thought of during  my middle school years. In fact, there was no such thing as middle school, a recent invention. In 7th grade, you went to Public Junior High School, unless you were Catholic or went to private school in order to keep your kids away from the Public Junior High School were the kids were supposedly Smoking Cigarettes and having Drag Races.  At least that's how our parents described it to us,  thereby lighting the fire within us to shed our green plaid jumpers and Kiss A Boy, which my best friend did and my mother’s best friend witnessed and told her and she yelled at me in that convoluted surrogate parenting that all parents do, including myself.
    But I digress. Before we could get to kiss boys, we had to play with a lot of Barbie  dolls.
   
Barbie2This is the Barbie that I played with. Note how stiff the dolls seem, with their perfect hair and poised arms. They usually didn't stay that way, after they were handled a million times by girls with grubby hands. We bent their arms, lost their heads, bit their feet, and left bombs of pointy, tiny shoes all over the house just waiting for a barefoot father to step on and scream.
    Barbies were impossibly pretty, a male fantasy, but Barbies were ours. And they were not helpless babies, they were women with lives of their own. Barbie had her own house. Barbie had her own car. Barbie had a boyfriend and a little sister, Skipper,A_5 for whom she seemed to have a responsibility. She even a best friend, Midge. MidgeYet, she didn't have a husband or kids. She was probably the first single role model that I had.
        Barbie had everything we didn't have - a pink roadster, a boyfriend with a tuxedo.  But the clothes, oh, the clothes! Barbies had outfits and a catalog of outfits and accessories.  Who had "outfits" and what the heck were accessories? I had a school uniform, a dress for Sunday, and probably a pair of stretch pants and two sweaters. That was my wardrobe and that of most of my friends and cousins.A_1

My sisters and I each had a Barbie suitcase similar to this one,  in black patent leather or pink, with a swingy handle and cool graphics, that were packed with our Barbie clothes and accessories.  (The same suitcases are on eBay these days for ridiculous prices and we all scream at ourselves for passing them onto younger cousins.)
    CatWith the same drooly, wild-eyed fervor that my kids display over the Sunday circular with Playstation 2 games, my little sisters and I drooled over the little Barbie catalogs that came with the dolls and outfits.  Barbie had red velvet coats with stand up collars, long white clothes to the elbows, and a red pillbox hat a la Jackie Kennedy and Audrey Hepburn.A_2 Barbie had a yellow  rain coat and white go-go boots. Barbie had strapless tulle gowns  with sparkly shoes and more elbow-length gloves.  And she had swimsuits with "cabana cover ups" ( we had no idea what a cabana was but we wanted one), and a cheer-leading sweater with real pompoms!

    If this all sounds impossible juvenile and pre-feminism, think of in the context of a working class family, whose older relatives spoke another language, and whose kids went to school with girls with impossible straight, shiny hair, monogrammed sweaters, and Bass Weejun tassel loafers. Barbie was our hold on the American dream. We begged and cried until Santa brought Barbie's Dream House A_6and roadster and we set up shop in the back corner of the living room. Most of my contemporaries had a Barbie, a Ken, a Midge, and a Skipper that they'd bring over "to play Barbie". The goal was to collect all the outfits and accessories one could for birthday and Christmas gifts.  (Barbie jumped the shark when Mattel realized the money was in the dolls, not in the accessories.     When Barbie started coming out in different roles and models for every week of the year, the concept of Barbie as a play item morphed into Barbie as a collectible.)
    The Princess has a box full of them, but I don’t recall her ever playing with them, not like my sisters and I did, for hours and hours, with complex neighborhoods made of shoes boxes and intricate social settings comprised of my mother’s bric a brac, pieces of carpet samples and, oh my God, finally after begging all A_7year, the Barbie swimming pool that we were allowed to fill and play with on the sink counter.
    When my mother sold the house after my Dad died, my sisters and I found all the old Barbie clothes in the attic and my two younger sisters and I fought over the 30-year old Barbie outfits. Who originally owned the Chubby faux fur jacket and hat? Did our aunt make the beaded wedding gown for me or Alicia? And while I couldn’t recall if I had been given the strapless foam green tulle ball gown, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that the red velvet coat and pillbox hat were MINE. We divvied up the Barbie clothes into neat plastic baggies and warned our own little ones not to even consider touching the vintage Barbie clothes!
    Years later, mine are sitting in their bag on my art room shelf. Once in a awhile I take them out, ostensibly to consider using them in a Miriam Schapiro type of art statement in which I will enshrine my acculturation  to the feminine and contrast it with icons of phallic technology .....
    A_4But instead I just fondle the red velvet coat, and put it with the opera length white gloves that I’ve never owned,  and twirl around the tulle ball gown that I’ve never had, and put on the tips of my fingers the little pointy stiletto heels that are all the rage now that I couldn’t even shove my foot into if I wanted to.
    And that’s why I have Barbies.

   

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