A head of the holidays
“I took Megan to the mall to see Santa,” my friend Nancy said. “She wasn’t scared at all. She hopped right up on his knee and after they chatted a bit, Santa asked what she wanted him to bring her for Christmas. Megan said, ‘I want a Barbie head.’”
Santa appeared startled and recoiled from 4-year-old Megan in an unnerved-looking, is-this-child-dangerous sort of way.
“You want just the head?” Santa asked.
Nancy quickly jumped in to explain that Megan was talking about one of the oversized Barbie heads that you can put makeup on and style their hair.
Santa, looking relieved, quickly rebounded. “Oh, yeah. Those,” he said. “My elves have been making lots of those heads this year.”
My daughter was also about 4 when she discovered Barbies, and her passion for collecting them was fervent (albeit short-lived). So for Christmas that year, her grandparents thought she’d be tickled with one of those big Barbie heads, even though Celeste had never seen one before.
On Christmas Eve, with the family all gathered around, Celeste excitedly ripped the paper from the top of the package, lifted the lid, grabbed a fistful of synthetic blonde hair and pulled it up out of the box.
And saw that it was just Barbie’s head.
She shrieked and dropped it like it was on fire. “Someone cut Barbie’s head off!”
Nothing we said could convince Celeste that the bodiless head was supposed to be that way, that it wasn’t evidence of grisly revenge taken against Barbie by a wronged mafia lord (or Ken). The head went back to the store.
By the time she was 6, Celeste had long abandoned Barbie in favor of the rather bizarre-looking Bratz, a line of dolls that, like my daughter, have a “passion for fashion.” Celeste was even more fanatical about collecting Bratz than she’d been with Barbies, but I was still surprised to find a Bratz head on her list of things she wanted that Christmas.
I bought the head, but since it didn’t come with a box, I was at a loss for how to wrap it. I wanted to avoid a recurrence of the severed head scene from two Christmases past. I decided it might be best to simply put a Santa hat on its head and stick it under the tree Christmas morning. When the day came, I tried it that way, but it seemed to be missing something. I added a fuzzy red scarf, wrapped loosely around the neck, then stepped back to appraise. The scarf looked like a puddle of blood.
I decided there was simply no way to make a gift head under a tree appear festive and fun. The best I could hope for was to achieve an effect only mildly disturbing.
Unfortunately, by that time I’d become so seduced by the hilarity of the beheaded Bratz in her pool of chintz blood that I just couldn’t undo it. At least not until I’d taken a picture or two.
It was right about then that my daughter awakened and, rubbing sleep from her eyes, stumbled into the room. She squinted at the tree. Blinked. Squinted. Cringed.
An expression of horror crept over her face, then she finally spoke.
“That red is totally the wrong color for her.”
