I am the Un American Girl

My daughter’s friend has a winter birthday so the invitation to a pool party was a bit of a surprise. Mom & Dad had rented a room at a local hotel with an indoor pool and gotten permission to have a party there. (They also rented the banquet hall.)

While we were leaving, a steady parade of girls came in. All were well dressed. Many were getting help with the brass carts that held their luggage. And all of them were carrying one or more American Girl dolls.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock the last 10 years, you know what an American Girl doll is. In a nutshell, it’s a doll that costs over a hundred dollars, comes from a certain time period in America history, has a book that tells her story, and an accessory line that totals more than the doll itself many times over.

My daughter was little when the rage started. When the company realized they could do some serious business, they opened American Girl Stores complete with cafes where the dolls have their own menu. Yes, the dolls. And hence, the destination of the well coiffed and coutured darlings parading into the lobby of the hotel.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a fantastic thing for young girls to learn about history through the eyes of someone like them in another time period. I do not think it’s fantastic to put a price tag on the education that when all is said and done could be a nice down payment on said girl’s first year of college. (Or one year of competitive swim…but I digress.)

Recently my daughter has started noting what she has been denied. Her friends have hundred dollar babies where she has hundreds of dollars of art supplies, swim suits, bangles, and bikes. I point this out to her and how the investment into her has allowed her to be who she is, not learn about who she might have been in another era.

That said, she is starting to read the stories. Well, not the actual American Girl stories, but ones much like it with a much better price tag. Her teacher hooked her onto the Dear America Series, a 148 book series (as listed on Amazon) with the majority being for girls, but there are 16 books in the series for boys as well. Right now my daughter is reading A Journey to the New World: The Diary of Remember Patience Whipple Mayflower 1620. She has told me about how Remember Patience might not live to see the New World and if she does, her parents and the friends she’s traveling with probably won’t because so many people on the Mayflower are sick. She told me how hard it was for Remember Patience to leave the Old Country because her grandparents are there, but on the other hand, people from her church were being tortured so leaving seemed necessary.

Uh. Okay!

She doesn’t need a $100 pilgrim girl doll with her $150 bed and $300 Mayflower to know the tale. Granted, Remember Patience’s wardrobe expense would probably be small because she wouldn’t have but one more outfit, if that, and if I took her to the café, she probably would only eat a few croutons because they would remind her of the bread crusts she ate on the Mayflower. (And she’d be happy to eat them without being surrounded by the plague.)

So, by saving myself $14,800 plus or minus another $20,000 for accessories to tell all the stories, I am freeing my daughter to explore what a girl in 2011 does, what she believes, reads, and who her friends are.

I say I’m getting a bargain.

Enjoy!

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