Dollhouse days

Lithographed dollhouse like the one where the rubber people lived

When I was about ten years old, my younger sister got a dollhouse for Christmas.  It was one of those lithographed, traditional two storey tin houses with window frames that really opened, and a single light in the living room of the house that was powered by a flashlight battery.  Wallpaper and some furniture were painted on the walls on the inside.  On the outside, red bricks, white siding, a chimney and even shingles were painted on the walls and roof.  It came with molded plastic furniture and a family made of a rubberized compound.  The family consisted of the parents, a little boy, a little girl and a baby.  Their painted-on smiles assured that they were always happy.

I loved that dollhouse.  

I guess Santa Claus felt that I was too old to still want to play with a dollhouse, but he was wrong, and after Christmas I decided that I would have a dollhouse – even if I had to make it myself – from Kleenex (tissue) boxes.  Every time the tissues were getting low in a Kleenex box, I’d be very attentive and would rush to collect the empty box before my father crushed it and put it in the garbage. 

My dollhouse wasn’t glamorous.  It was held together with tape and the rubber family were a bit too tall for it.  I made furniture from things like thread spools, jar lids, and bottle caps.  There were no windows with frames that really opened, no lights powered by flashlight batteries, no wallpaper or bricks or siding painted on the walls unless I used my imagination and drew them on myself.  It was flimsy and the boxes were often mismatched, adding to the charming disarray of the house, and if the “furniture” was too heavy, the floors would often bow from the weight. 

I was so proud of that dollhouse.

My sister and I would play with our dollhouses in the basement for hours, particularly during school holidays in the summer when, in the days before central air conditioning, the basement was a cool oasis from the blazing summer sun.

When we played, we’d load our houses with every miniature doll we owned, and whenever we’d acquire a new doll that would meet the height restrictions or could be bent to fit into our houses, it was welcomed to move in.  In our dollhouse world, there was a never-ending sense of “the more, the merrier”.  We’d add more beds to bedrooms, or put numerous dolls in one bed, and never turned away a homeless doll.  It was so simple – move ‘em in and they always lived happily ever after.  There was never any concerns about the cost of feeding so many mouths, nor arguments among the dolls living in such tight quarters over things like taking too long in the one and only bathroom in the house.  Come to think of it, I don’t recall our dolls ever spending much time at all in the bathroom.   And our dollhouse babies just mysteriously appeared without thought or explanation about how they were conceived.

Children were so innocent back then.  We used our imaginations, and we weren’t burdened with too much information too soon.  In our eyes, life was so simple.  You looked after people without thought to cost or ego.  It was never considered to be inconvenient to help someone in need. 

A year or two after Santa left a dollhouse for my sister, he gave me one.  It was an ultra modern one storey six-sided house made of fibre board with a plastic dome covering the round room in the middle.  I was almost a teenager by that time, and perhaps that was the reason that I never played much with that house.

A few years ago, I bought myself a proper wooden dollhouse and spent a fortune on collectible miniature furniture, wallpaper, and lighting for it.  It’s an ongoing project, and although I haven’t worked on it for a long time, I know I will enjoy finishing it one day.  Whenever I look at it, all wrapped in plastic on a shelf in the basement, I remember my Kleenex box dollhouse and the rubber people who lived in it, and for a minute, every so often, I wonder what the world would be like if we saw it through the eyes of an innocent child.