I hadn’t been shopping on eBay for most of the year. I was disgusted with the ridiculous shipping and customs costs increase introduced for no apparent reason around March. At the same time, I had no immediate need to use eBay because my local portals offered great deals on dolls that had been on my wish list. All this combined made me forget about eBay and for good several months I wouldn’t even open it because nothing less than a deal of a lifetime would change my mind and induce me to shop there. As it happens, at the end of September I just opened eBay to check the availability of a doll I was trying to add to my collection for the third year in a row and guess what! The deal of a lifetime was waiting for me right there.
Autumn is the time when I feel the need to add another Holiday Barbie to my collection and I plan to get all the first 10 dolls released. I’m missing a few of them still and the lovely Happy Holidays Barbie 1993 was one of them. The blonde is gorgeous and she is fairly easy to acquire, but it was the African American variant that stole my heart completely. In general, I think that the luxurious Happy Holidays ensembles look spectacular on a darker skin tone, but HH ’93 Barbie is a pure perfection to me in every way. She is, of course, much more sought after than a regular blonde and commands higher prices that were normally out of my range and too heavy a strain on my conscience but not this time. I was actually looking at an auction of a perfect, still in box doll for a price I couldn’t believe in and I took my chances having confidence in the eBay buyers protection program. Covid makes everything more problematic and complicated and has disrupted our lives in every possible way, affecting even something as trivial and insignificant as shopping online so I wasn’t sure if the doll would ever reach me, but I hit ‘buy now’ without a second thought.
The doll took ages to arrive, and the six, almost seven weeks I was waiting for her seemed even longer because she would stuck in the middle of nowhere for over two weeks with the same status and the phrase “arriving late” looked strangely ominous. When the postman finally did hand the doll over to me, the outer packaging looked like a wreck! It was smashed as if an elephant accidentally stepped on it and there were stickers all over it. One said “wrong address” which explains the delay. The tape was also repeatedly peeled off possibly by the customs officials who were at their wits ends as to what to do with the doll. I don’t exactly understand why for some dolls you have to incur the customs costs and for others there’s no such requirement, perhaps the price dictates it, but mine was free of that particular charge. I guess when the customs officials saw the enormous outer box and a luxurious and expensive looking doll inside they were eager to impose a charge but couldn’t do it so they transferred her to other offices. She’s been checked three times to my knowledge and then she finally got the green light. Our customs officials do take their job seriously it seems. Anyway, the doll arrived, the outer box fell apart in my hands and then I did the worst thing possible – I freed the doll of her cardboard prison.
There was no way for me to resist it. The doll did look splendid in her box, but that’s not my way of collecting. I have to take the doll out of the box, feel her hair, check the face paint in its tiniest, most minute details, I have to admire the outfit to its best advantage and that can be only done when you actually take the doll out of the box. The box I kept of course. I always do it because I think it’s a part of the doll itself. The thing is, the two parts don’t always have to be inseparable in my opinion. I appreciate all the information that a box offers and I store every single one I get even if it no longer resembles a box. As for the doll, she’s simply ravishing. She pushed back some of the Barbies that stood in the first row to make room for her lovely self. The rich kanekalon curls are still soft and her face paint is a piece of art really. The opalescent eyeshadow round her fiercely green eyes and the coral lips look so perfect on the Christie head sculpt.
When I cut off the threads holding her dress, it actually exploded in my face with the layers upon layers of red tulle sprinkling golden glitter all over me. I guess if a dress like that existed in real human size, it would make it impossible to move at all. The dress was made to resemble a Poinsettia and my favorite part is the golden corset adorned with miniature flowers and beads. There are two oversized bows that you can remove because only single elastic bands hold her on the shoulders. A pair of some large earrings made of beads, a single flower in Barbie’s hair and a simple ring finish the look. Barbie’s wearing simple red pumps with bows and she came with a golden doll stand and a hair brush in the same color. I was a bit worried if the doll still had her shoes because they were very well concealed. The last item that I found in the box was a lovely picture of the doll that you could actually frame and hang on the wall.
I love all the first Happy Holiday Barbie dolls but so far the year ’96 with her burgundy and golden gown and her striking purple eyes was my favorite. This hasn’t changed, I still simply love the doll and everything about her, but now she has to share the first place on the podium with Happy Holidays 1993 African American. Here’s all HH dolls I’ve managed to collect so far. I’m missing the very first one from 1988 and two more and my ’89 has an incomplete outfit but they’re a lovely bunch.
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