Christmas Morning Doll Unwrapping, American Suburban Home, 1950s

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Christmas Morning Doll Unwrapping, American Suburban Home, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Christmas Morning Doll Unwrapping, American Suburban Home, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-EE4994

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A girl in a flannel print robe — the kind sewn or purchased specifically to be worn on Christmas morning, because in the 1950s Christmas morning had a costume — sits cross-legged on the living-room floor in that brief window between waking the parents and being told to get dressed, entirely absorbed in the face of a newly unwrapped doll. The haul around her is a precise catalogue of what a well-organised Santa delivered that decade: a Betty McCall paper-doll tin with its plaid-and-label lid, a Felix the Cat stuffed figure in striped trousers standing at attention beside wrapped boxes still unopened, and a ceramic snowman that will live on a shelf until it is accidentally broken in 1961. The doll she is holding gets her full attention because it has hair you can actually comb, which was the technological breakthrough that made every other toy in the room temporarily irrelevant. Adults in this era believed that giving a child a doll with combable hair was giving her a skill; the child believed she had received a person who needed her. The floor will be cleared, the boxes flattened, and the robe traded for church clothes, but for the next ten minutes she is the most focused person in the house.

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