I’m trying to finish my Christmas shopping for Bella. I hope to be done before November is over because I really don’t want to have to deal with the Christmas shopping madness this year. I’m also trying to buy everything online. The fewer interactions I have to have with actual people, the better.
Anyway, that’s not the point of this post. I was Christmas shopping for Bella and remembering what Christmas was like when I was a kid. My younger sister and I had great Christmases. No complaints. Except one little thing: every year my mom got each of us the special holiday edition Barbie doll. The were always the BEST Barbie dolls. They had the fluffiest dresses and the prettiest hair and came in the fanciest boxes. But guess what? We weren’t allowed to play with them. They had to stay in their boxes because they were “collector’s items.” They would be “worth money one day.” It was complete and total torture. We tried to play with them in their boxes for a while; we would have all our “free” Barbies strewn about and then a row of these creepy trapped holiday Barbies in boxes. I think we pretended they were in observation tanks or something, preserved behind cheap plastic to insure the survival of the Barbie race. Maybe in case of zombie Barbie apocalypse. Has Mattel made Zombie Barbie yet? I’m getting off track.
After a while we just couldn’t take it anymore and so we started taking them out. We carefully opened their boxes and unwrapped their twist tie restraints and freed them from their plastic prisons of isolation, but when we were done playing, we had to return them to their boxes and retie their twist ties and reseal their boxes as best we could to avoid angering my mother. It was a pretty sad set up.
Since I’m complaining about things, I might as well bring this up: there was something else that was sad about our Barbie set up: my parents never got us a Barbie Dream House. OH WHOA IS ME AND MY CHILDHOOD.
Do you know what we had to use as our Barbie house? No, you don’t. So I’ll show you.
Yeah that’s right. Our Barbie dream house was this foot stool. I like to call this an “excellent example of an active imagination.”
I totally plan on using this in future arguments when Bella hands over her Christmas list: “You want an iPod? Oh, that’s too bad. I had to use a foot stool for my Barbie house. Here’s a cardboard box. Pretend it’s an iPod.”
I used to take my Barbies, sit them in my roller skates, lace them in, and shove them as fast and as hard as I could down the stairs.
It was their roller coaster.
I have a feeling you and I would have made as excellent childhood friends as we do adult friends.