What I don't get is the obsession with a doll. We never had collections like that and certainly not to play with.
Dolls were never my thing, either. I wanted guns! My two younger girls have a couple of Barbies and two or three "Groovy Girls" (cloth dolls) that they play with sometimes, but they'd rather be outside playing Civil War.
I remember my older sister having a Shirley Temple doll that she took very good care of. I was the kid who operated on her dolls! The only collection I ever got, and believe I have kicked myself for not having the foresight as a 6 y.o. to hold on to this collection for the big bucks I'd now have,(just kidding), was the original Barbie doll. The doll, a complete set of clothes and available accessories was purchased for me that Christmas by my father's co-workers because my mother was close to death from cancer. If memory serves, Barbie is a Mattel toy and now the American Girl Dolls are as well? How sad. I wonder what we would have thought had we known back in 1959 just how much our culture was going to abandoned life.