It's not how you start, it's how you finish!: Granny's Dolls, Part II

People who know me well know that Christmas is no longer my favorite time of the year. It used to be! Christmas growing up was so magical. But since my parents divorce, and several divorces of my own, Christmas - for me - has become more of a burden. My brother and I along with our families go to my mother's for Christmas Eve dinner and make arrangement to go to my dad's house some other evening for dinner, sometime within the Christmas week. Then Steve's and my children spend Christmas Day with their other biological parent and grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, leaving Steve and me to spend the day quietly alone.

My Christmas List has a minimum of 20 presents to figure out and buy and wrap and deliver and on top of that, everywhere you turn people are asking for donations for the needy. My church does the Christmas shoe boxes to send to children in foreign countries as well as the Christmas Angel tree for the local needy children. All the Walmart and grocery stores have Salvation Army bell ringers in front of their doors to greet you every time you come and go for the month (or more) leading up to Christmas Day. The radio stations and television stations host canned food drives and Toys for Tots and bicycle drives. The different departments located in my building at work take up a collection to give as bonuses to the custodial workers who clean our offices, and an extra large box is also placed just inside the entryway to collect new toys to be donated to some other, non-specified charity. It’s exhausting! It wears me out! And puts me in a black funk for weeks.

And then there was yesterday.

Yesterday Steve-O was off work, so we left the house to go mark a few presents off our list and to take care of a few errands, with no particular destination or time-frame in mind. And as we passed an antique store located 2 miles from our house, I pointed it out and told him that I had seen a cookie jar there a month or so ago. Something he and I had jokingly talked about giving to my mother as a gag gift some year. So Steve turned the car around and, on a whim, we visited the little store.

We were walking up and down the aisles looking for the cookie jar when there sat one of Granny's Raggedy Ann dolls.

Oh, it might not be. There is absolutely no way for me to prove that it is. She didn’t mark “her” dolls in any way. But its hair was orange instead of red. And it was left in loops instead of cut into individual strands, as Gran had sometimes done. And the hen and egg fabric of its dress was familiar - because I had wanted her to use that fabric for MY doll's dress. And the legs were blue stripes instead of red, which reminded me of the pillow ticking fabric Gran sometimes used.

I had a gut reaction. I latched onto the baby doll, and at 47 years of age, I became an emotional wreck. Steve didn’t understand at first that when I said, “This is one of Granny’s dolls!” that I meant this PARTICULAR doll had been handmade by MY grandmother. There was no way on earth I could leave without her. She was only $15, but Steve knew it wouldn't have mattered if she was $100.

I've compared her to my babies, the ones Gran made especially for me 37 years ago. The ones I have stored underneath my bed in a protective plastic bin. She may not be one of Gran's dolls, but no one will ever be able to convince me that she isn't.

And 22 years after Gran passed away, she gave me back my Christmas magic and joy.