“Skipper Doll Trading Thing”

Photo by XINYI SONG on Unsplash

When we were younger, my two older sisters and I were obsessed with skipper dolls (pretty much barbie dolls, but the adolescent “undeveloped” version). A few of the dolls and accessories were actually ones that our mom played with when she was a little girl in the ‘60s.

We collected all kinds of things to add to our toys - “Kelly” dolls (which were only $5 at the time. We had a huge collection of those), plastic horses, wooden craft boxes that were the perfect size for a skipper doll trunk, and mini tea sets. We also had some plastic recipe box holders that we used as wagons and snuck all kinds of beans from the kitchen (1 kidney bean was the perfect hunk of meat). We collected chestnuts behind our church and those looked just like a roast. We crocheted blankets, formed and “cooked” playdough into food, cut out and sometimes actually sewed little outfits, and made little books out of paper.

Our favorite things to play with our dolls were wagon trail, reenacting “The Sound of Music” and other favorite movies, and playing choir.

I remember when we three girls were first given Sarah and Laura’s collection of dolls with all their clothes, furniture, and dishes. We girls gathered in the “big girls” room and Sarah went through the big box of toys and equally distributed everything between us. Each of us girls had our own box and we only played with our own stuff.

But after a while we would start to get tired of our own things and covet what our sisters had. So, a year later, we asked our older sister to again divide up the toys. Of course, there were a few precious items that were ours to keep and we just set those aside during the big trade. That felt like we were getting all new things and was one of the highlights of the year.

From then on, we had what we elegantly named a “skipper doll trading thing” every year. We would beg an older sibling to divide up the dolls. I remember my older brother Phil officiating the trade one year - he would collect all the like things into a pile, then make three piles of those (for example, all the girl shoes divided equally into three piles). We would take turns being the first to choose which pile we could keep.

We girls played with our dolls until one day my older sister Hannah declared that we were too old to play with toys. So we dutifully packed up everything we had into a ginormous bin and put it safely into the attic. But then, Rebekah and I missed playing. So a few days later, we pulled that box back out of the attic and set up our houses. Only then did we realize that skipper dolls were no longer fun. We, too, had started to grow up.

I have so many other memories of playing with these beloved dolls - taking them outside and creating mud houses, setting up my “family” and taking pictures on my family’s film camera, doing baptism services, making soup out of water and ground chalk for color (and badly staining our carpet in the process), and doll haircuts (copying the scene in Anne of Green Gables where Anne and Diana cut their hair and give a piece to each other).

What are some of your fond childhood toy memories?