24 Days to Christmas: Day 8

Day 7: Best Gift You Received As a Child

I really hate it when you ask people what they want for Christmas and they say something like, "I just want everyone to have a happy and safe holiday." Or when you ask what someone's best gift is, and they say, "The love of my family." Gag. My parents probably wanted to roll their eyes every time I put "world peace" on my Christmas list. (But c'mon... I couldn't not put it on the list, just in case the only reason we hadn't achieved world peace was that no one had yet asked Santa for it. Santa's magic. He probably could do it.)

"Why are you letting this three-year-old hold me?"

So I'll make you vomit a little by saying that my best childhood Christmas gift was my sister.

Awww.

She was born on Christmas Eve, and I wanted her to be a boy. I don't really remember what I thought of her, and as a kid I probably wouldn't have said she was the best gift ever -- although she did get to come home from the hospital in a giant stocking.  However, looking back, she's not too bad.

However, I'll temper the sappiness of saying my sister was my best Christmas gift by telling a story about cheating her out of another gift.

I don't remember a lot of particular Christmas gifts, mostly because we got fairly modest things for Christmas most years (Barbies, Star Wars "guys", books). I think I mostly asked for smaller things anyway, or really big things that my parents were never going to get us -- I always wanted our family to get a computer, but we never did.

One year, we each got a baby doll. I think maybe we were around 3 and 6, or 4 and 7. One of the dolls was dressed in pink and had sweet little baby clothes and I think a bottle. She had molded plastic hair.

The other doll was Sasha baby. You can see Sasha baby at right. She's an adorable little doll, with a sweet face, right? I'm just not sure why she has crazy white hair. Had she been frightened, and her hair turned white? Suffered an extreme illness? I didn't know, but I did not want a baby with old lady hair.

But Sasha baby was my gift, and I was not going to appear ungrateful. So somehow I convinced my younger sister (because three-year-olds are easily manipulated) that she really wanted Sasha baby, and because I was a nice sister, I said I would trade with her. Which we did, and I got the doll with the molded plastic hair.

Somehow, though, I've ended up with Sasha baby, and she's still in my bedroom, one of the few toys that I s have from childhood. Apparently, Sasha dolls were made by a Swiss artist. They wanted their dolls to represent universality, so they gave them skin that was a mix of all the skin tones on Earth. However, I still don't know why my Sasha baby has white hair. No child has that color of hair. Still, I love Sasha baby and she's a good reminder that I shouldn't try to manipulate my little sister.