American Girls...Why do they hold a special place in my collection and in my heart? Well, it's a long story that starts in about 1996 or 97 when I was maybe four years old.
My cousin owned several dolls. She had Samantha, Molly, Kirsten, Felicity, Josefina and Addy and she later added Kit to the gang. But this story starts before Kit's joining the family. With Molly, Kirsten, Felicity and Samantha.
I would go with my dad and brother to visit my cousins and I did love to see her beautiful American Girl dolls on their little clothes trunk display bench in the hallway. My cousin used to let me play with her dolls sometimes - She taught me which clothes went to which character, which brush I was allowed to use for their hair...and that I was never to take Kirsten's hair out of the loops in which it came because they were tricky to put back in. This, I disobeyed once, and I got her hair back into the braid loop without my cousin ever knowing I'd taken it down.
Hours were spent brushing their hair, carefully changing them into their other outfits (I loved Kirsten's Santa Lucia dress and Felicity's blue party gown) and otherwise carefully and adoringly playing with my cousin's dolls while I was visiting. She would get one every year for Christmas until Kaya's release, then the collection was put on hold and soon, into storage as she grew up.
When I was a little older, maybe seven or eight, while my cousin still had her dolls out for me to play with them, I also had a friend who had American Girl dolls. She had Felicity and her sister had Josefina. Her mother would babysit me sometimes while the girls were at school (I was home schooled) and I would always go take those two beautiful girls out of their toy closet and fix their hair, put them back in their own clothes.
I loved those dolls (found the MyTwinn a little creepy back then, but I was a kid, what can I say?) and I took the best care of them I could while I was at her house. Felicity was my baby girl when we played house. The memories are precious to me.
Every Christmas up to the year I turned 25, my brother and my mom would order me the American Girl catalog just to see the way I pored over the pages, trying to decide what I would want if I could have something. I would spend hours staring at the dolls, marking the pages that had what I wanted most. But never once did I actually ask for an American Girl doll. I knew they were expensive as heck even when I was a little girl.
Fast forward to 2018, I'm twenty-five and making a plan to go into New York City with my sister for a day while she's visiting the area and it dawns on me all at once that American Girl Place isn't a far off walk from where we're going to be. So...for the first time in like a decade, I'll get to handle an American Girl doll again.
I found myself digging into their website and the history of the dolls, finding the old, familiar characters and looking for the new ones too. I discovered the Girl of the Year for 2018 was Luciana Vega, a little Latina girl whose dream was to be an Astronaut and whose lesson was one in leadership while she was at Space Camp. Irony? She shared a name, ethnicity, looks and love of Space with my character Martina's little girl, Luciana.
So, that day at AG Place in New York City, I went home with my brand new Luciana Vega doll. My first American Girl doll to truly call my own and my favorite to this day because of that. Luciana will forever hold a place of honor in my collection as a childhood dream come true in the best way possible.
I wasn't entirely sure at the time if she would be as amazing as I'd hoped. I was worried after I bought her that taking her out of the box and holding her for the first time would be anticlimactic...maybe my childhood memories were just exaggerated by what it had felt like when I was seven, eight years old and I'd be disappointed by the dolls as an adult. Luciana proved me so, so wrong. And opened a rabbit hole I hadn't meant to fall into...
See the next Collection Spotlight/Storytime entry for more on my AG dolls though - this entry is already so long.
--Angela--
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