All Dolled Up for Christmas

Here is what I want to tell you: My Christmas memories are rich with roasting chestnuts, singing carols and evergreen boughs bent from the weight of red cardinals on white snow.

That is what I want to tell you. But my most vivid childhood memory is less soft-focus nostalgic and more sharp-edge commercial. There was this doll, Chatty Cathy, and I wanted it!

She had blond hair, blue eyes and a plastic potbelly body that resembled my own 5-year-old self in 1961. She also had a plastic ring attached to a string at the back of her neck. When pulled, Chatty Cathy, true to her name, talked. I had to have that doll.

I was the fourth of what would soon be six children and could barely get a word in edgewise so I am pretty sure the household didn’t need another talking anything. But the doll was all I wanted. Maybe I was simply vulnerable to the sales pitch. Mattel bombarded the airwaves that season with images of the freckle-faced, 20-inch plastic wonder, yammering away. They manipulated my innocent emotions with their carefully crafted advertisements for the sole purpose of making a buck. Like I cared! I needed that doll.

My mom said, “No.” She said it wasn’t that cute. She said I’d get bored with it. I didn’t understand what that woman had against Chatty Cathy but if she were going to stand between me and the doll of my dreams, I’d just have to ask someone else to deliver the goods.

I never liked the cotton-bearded-red-suited fake Santas at the mall but I understood the necessity of helpers: The real Santa was kind of busy. So I stood in line for just short of forever until finally my turn came and I climbed onto a red velvet lap to shyly confide my deepest desires into his hairy ear. He said he’d be sure to bring me “a talking dolly.” A talking dolly? Clearly, I couldn’t rely on this mall Santa to convey an accurate message to the big guy, and Christmas was just weeks away. This called for drastic measures. I had to go direct to the really, really big guy. The following Sunday in church I got down on my knees and prayed for, heaven forgive me, Chatty Cathy. I knew God could deliver but I wasn’t sure He would. There was the incident with that kid on the teeter-totter. But hadn’t we both learned a valuable lesson on the laws of gravity?

I had to be absolutely certain I’d tapped every possible pipeline to the North Pole well-of-gifts. When my best friend Karen wanted a toy, she simply expressed her desire to her parents who calmly discussed the pros and cons over dinner. A doll that wets? Are you certain you want that responsibility? At least, this is how I imagined conversations in those neat and tidy homes where meals were eaten on time and slowly, and living rooms did not merit their name. So I did what any Chatty Cathy-coveting-five-year-old would do. I asked Karen to ask for the doll.

“But I don’t want a Chatty Cathy.”

“If you don’t like her, you can give her to me!” said I.

“I’ve already asked my parents for Patti Playpal.”

“So ask Santa!”

“There’s no such thing as Santa.”

“Shhh! He’ll hear you!”

“How can he hear me,” Karen asked, “if he doesn’t exist?”

Whoa! This mind-bending philosophical conundrum was the sort I needed to talk over with someone I could trust. Someone like Chatty Cathy! I imagined the two of us having intimate conversations over cups of imaginary tea. We’d drop the formalities. I’d call her simply Cathy. I’d tell her my secrets. She’d keep them. And when we were alone in the hours before sleep, she’d say in that sweet, sing-songy voice of hers, “I love you.” Imagine! Love — or a close, recorded proximity — right there, whenever I needed it. Sure, I’d have to pull a few strings, but still.

I desperately wanted that doll.

My mother told me straight up: No Chatty Cathy. When it came to the Naughty or Nice list, I had too many checks in column A. My own mother declared me not doll-worthy. Let’s just say the psychological wounds didn’t heal until years later when I learned that the $25 Chatty Cathy cost more than most of the men in our neighborhood earned in a day.

That Christmas morning, my brothers and sister and I woke long before dawn. We spent the morning tearing open presents in a flurry of red-and-green paper. My brothers got the hockey skates, racetrack set and red fire truck they’d wanted. My sister found a bride doll under the tree. I opened plenty of presents, but I can’t recall a single one. When the last bit of satin ribbon was neatly rolled to save for next Christmas, my tears began.

No Chatty Cathy?!? My friend was right. There was no Santa Claus. There was no good will toward men. There was no good anywhere in this big wide world and, obviously, not an ounce of good in me.

“Have you looked behind the tree?” my dad asked.

Of course I had, a million times. He told me to look again. Lo and behold! There she stood. I couldn’t believe my eyes. How could I have missed her? Santa had apparently run short of time or wrapping paper because the doll awaited me in all her cardboard-and-cellophane-packaged glory. Family legend has it that my ever-practical mother refused to spend money on an expensive doll that was bound to bore. But my dad, sensing that his youngest daughter had invested her young soul in a hunk of plastic, rushed out on Christmas Eve in search of the last Chatty Cathy on Earth or, at least, the nearest mall.

So that Christmas when I was five years old, there were no roasting chestnuts, singing carols or red cardinals on snowy boughs. But there was a doll. I held her close.