Merry Christmas!

My photo shoot didn't turn out exactly the way I wanted it, but here it is. And you can say we have a bit of a white Christmas.

I hope all of you are enjoying your day (or enjoyed your day, for my Aussie friends), no matter what your weather looks like!

My Collection Part Eleven: Hallmark Christmas Barbies

One of Coffee and Dolls' posts reminded me that this is the perfect time of year to take pictures of my three Hallmark Christmas Barbie dolls for the My Collection series that I'm doing. Hallmark is a chain of stores in the United States that sells greeting cards, collectibles, and holiday ornaments. They have made Barbie themed Christmas ornaments in the past, and also some Barbie dolls dressed for holidays. All of the dolls that I have also came with, appropriately enough, holiday greeting cards, which you'll see as a group at the end. Every item that a doll is holding is from my own Christmas minis collection.

The first doll is the Holiday Memories Barbie doll from 1995. Her costume is based on a Christmas card, that was included with the doll. She also came with a Happy New Year 1910 card. Barbie's hat, cutaway coat, overskirt and narrow skirt are pretty close to a 1909-1910 style. Her hair is styled with rolls on either side, to approximate a 1910s hairstyle. The rubber band holding her hair disintegrated, so I had to re-band it. I had a hard time getting a good picture of the back of her hair, possibly because of all the blond reflecting in the light.

Yuletide Romance Barbie is from 1996. Her style era is a little bit more nebulous, 1890s, maybe. Unlike my other two dolls here who wear boots, Yuletide Romance only wears green pumps. She came with two Christmas cards.

Holiday Traditions Barbie is also from 1996. She wears an outdoor outfit, maybe suitable for ice skating or a sleigh ride. She came with one card, bearing a picture of two purple-y roses, to match her costume.

Here are all the cards that the dolls came with. I honestly don't know now where the two cards that fold over came from. The only cards I saw in pictures of the dolls for sale, that I looked at to remind me of their names and years, were all the flat ones. I have a Hallmark Valentine's Day Barbie, but I don't think I have any other Christmas dolls that would have come with cards.

I want to get a modern day doll-size living room with a tree set up before Christmas Day. We'll see how that goes!

Total dolls: 44

Let It Snow

Well, we got our first real snow of the season starting last night, into today, and boy, did we get snow. Here on the west side of Cleveland, we got about a foot and a half of snow, which means the east side got even more. If you're interested in weather (like RagingMoon1987) check out "lake effect snow." Cold wet air from Canada comes over Lake Erie, which is currently warmer than the air, and snow then gets dumped on Northeast Ohio. It's natural to me, because I've lived with it all my life, but apparently this phenomenon is only found in a few other places in the world.

I took this picture today, around 2:00 PM local time. The snow today was what we call "wet" snow. It's quite easily packable, which is great if you're a kid making igloos and snowballs, but it's *very* heavy to shovel.

I just took this picture before I started this post. The Dancer just re-shoveled the sidewalk when she got home from work.

Happily for me, I have many projects to work on as the cold weather comes in and the snow piles up this December. Some of it is human related, some of it is doll-related. There is another little girl in my life who likes the LOL Surprise dolls, so I will get to use up some of the fabric that I bought to use in a LOL Surprise little dollhouse that I made for a friend's daughter, back in 2018. Does anyone else in the Northern hemisphere have any fun winter projects planned? Well, I know TheMonsterCrafts does, but I bet she never sees snow like this!