Dolls of Our Lives by Mary Mahoney

Author:Mary Mahoney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends

The Only Gift Guide We Need: The American Girl Catalogue

To this day, if you wanted to buy us a gift, the American Girl catalogue would be a great place to start. We’re forever grateful Pleasant didn’t bring her dolls to Toys “R” Us #RIP, instead giving us the gift of the catalogues. We’re also sending up a prayer that the post office never goes bankrupt, because we can’t imagine a world where these aren’t showing up at our doors.

In the press rollouts of American Girl, Pleasant described the catalogue as a means of keeping costs low. Costs were a concern from the beginning—both keeping them down and justifying the expense of everything AG. Selling through direct mail kept costs down by 30 percent, Pleasant explained. She wanted to keep the price within reach of kids who wanted to play with the dolls, rather than collectors who wanted them only for display. With such consideration to keep costs down, Pleasant took umbrage at any talk of her dolls costing too much. Buying Kirsten with her first book cost $68 that first year, she acknowledged, “but lots of people spent $80 last year for a talking teddy bear that likely stopped talking a few months after Christmas.” Teddy Ruxpin deserves this shade! Honestly, after Mary played a Janet Jackson tape in her brother’s Teddy Ruxpin, she was anything but in #control.

But we’re more interested here in what children made of her catalogue, and not the business savvy behind it. The earliest fans of AG could easily relate to Pleasant’s “my feelings cannot be contained” energy. When Pleasant was going on her media tour, newspapers printed profiles of the brand with information on where to write to obtain the hallowed catalogue. One newspaper failed to include the contact info and had to print the address in the next edition in response to the outpouring of letters they’d received. These young readers were about to find out something we know all too well: the only thing better than owning something from American Girl was dreaming about buying something from the American Girl catalogue.

Women of our generation can conjure an almost religious devotion to it. With senses fully engaged, our listeners echo our own experiences, recalling the exhilaration of receiving it in the mail, the feeling of turning the pages. Did you skip to your favorite character’s section first? (Molly, obviously.) Did you want clothes for yourself so that you could match your doll? When we got the catalogue in the mail, we re-created our own interpretation of 2 Fast 2 Furious, flipping through pages with the recklessness of Vin Diesel behind the wheel. We’d make lists of everything we’d buy if we lived on Samantha Parkington’s budget. Even knowing we’d never get everything on the list, the cultivation of that desire into a wish list brought its own kind of thrill.

We weren’t alone. In talking to other people our age about American Girl, we found a lot of fans who felt the same. “I remember vividly the day that the catalogue arrived,” one listener shared with us.

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