The big present on Christmas morning when I was a kid was always a doll. Yes, I was that kind of a kid, a doll-player. I don’t remember lobbying for a particular doll the way kids do today for gifts, but maybe I did. Turns out I remember a whole lot less than I thought I did.
I got the idea for the prompt remembering a doll I got one year. She was a Suzie Walker and when I googled her, what to my wondering eyes did appear but a montage of the Dolls I Used To Own, more or less. I thought it would be cute, fitting, neat (and relatively easy) to write a post about my Christmas dolls.
Ha!
That Suzy Walker– or was it the Susie Walker–was she the Canadian version? Or was she a Saucy Walker? Or was she actually a Patty Playpal, which is the closest to what I remember?
Was she the 10”, the 18” or the 36”? What I remember was that she was tall, child-size almost, and she had rooted hair, quite a new thing for the time. I got her the year either my mother had her emergency appendectomy or my sister had eye surgery. I know this because I associate that doll with having spent a lot of time by myself in a hospital waiting room.
One year I got a Tiny Tears doll for Christmas. She had little holes at the inside of each eye and when you gave her a bottle, water would come out of them Tears, get it? My Tiny Tears had a luscious brown curly haired wig, which I remember particularly because it was that I showed to Frances, the friend of my mother’s who was going to give me a permanent the year I was nine. Frances, who sported a perioxide pompadour she had first mastered during World War II, was good to her word and I ended up looking like this:
I also had a terrific collection of Ginny dolls, that my mother added to every Christmas. They’d be worth a fortune if I still had them. Or if they were really Ginny dolls. My mother would not have appreciated the resale value of buying a genuine Vogue Ginny when she could get a no-name for much less. I know this because, yes, in the days when I was selling antiques and collectibles, I appraised my own dolls. Maybe one of them was a jointed-leg Ginny; the others, nope.
Although I was one of those little girls who played with dolls all the time, as personalities they don’t seem to loom large in my memory. One odd fact, though: every year, when I got that doll, I would name her Susie. I have no idea why. Does that indicate that they weren’t individuals to me (you try psychoanalyzing yourself from a distance of 50+ years), or that I suffered from a lack of creativity? If so, I passed that gene on to my niece, Kayla, whose dolls had no names, only numbers. “Do you want Dolly Number Three or Four in bed for your nap,” we would ask her. My sister showed far more creativity. One year, we were given the same exact doll. She called hers Sam; mine was Susie. Hers was a boy; mine a girl. Go figure.
The only doll I didn’t name Susie was the last doll I got for Christmas. She was a ballet dancer (as I had aspirations to be) with a white tutu and pink rubber ballet slippers that fit her forever-pointed, first position feet. I called her Vicky, after Victoria Page, the main character in the movie, Red Shoes. Please don’t tell me the character’s name wasn’t Victoria Page. Or point out that the doll pictured is, in fact, wearing a red tutu. 
In all of this, I would like to be able to give you some nugget of wisdom that I learned on my trip down Doll Memory Lane. But the fact is that I either don’t remember so well–or there were just as many knockoffs in the 50s as there are today. Perhaps it’s a bit of both.
Were you a doll girl–or boy? What were your favorites?
Photo credits: chicagonow.com; kaylee’s korner of kollectibles; dollreference.com
Jane Gassner
