Toys!!!!!

As far as toys went, the boys had carved horses that Farfar had carved for them. I especially remember one horse that was carved to look like a mare that Dad had called Flora. She was brown and Farfar had painted this horse brown. They didn't have any little cars and such.

We played a lot with fir cones and pine cones. Sometimes we picked up

little sticks and used them to put legs and necks on the cones. Then we made fences and the little cones were sheep and the bigger cones were cows. We pretended that they did all the same things that the cows did. When you opened the barn doors, the cows would always go in and find their own stall. It didn't matter what order they went in; they always found their own place, so we made little stalls for our cone cows and had them moo and walk into their stalls.

When we were little, us girls had some cloth dolls. The bodies, arms and legs were made out of strong white material and stuffed with sawdust. The heads were made of metal that was painted. My doll had painted golden hair and pink in the face and red lips. Over the white material, Hildegarde sewed on pink for the legs and arms and what looked like black boots and then she made clothes for the dolls. Every Christmas we had to give up our doll for a couple of days so Hildegarde could make new clothes for them. I have my suspicions that they also made new bodies and stuffed them again, because that sawdust was probably smelly after a year.

Eventually, Brita and Sara got dolls with real china faces, and Margaretha and I were not supposed to touch them. One time when I was sick though, Brita brought her doll and laid it next to me and said that it could sleep next to me until I was well. That was sisterly love.

Then when I was six or seven and Margaretha two years younger, we got dolls with china faces. I still remember what the dress looked like and she had little white boots or shoes made out of soft leather, like glove leather. Her first dress wore out and by then I was old enough so I made her another dress. I played some with that doll but my favorite was still the rag doll. I think my six nieces played more with the china doll than I did myself, that was Birgitta, Gunilla, Christina, Ingalena, AnnCatherine and Helene. When we came home in 1966, though, the doll was still there in Kjettestorp. It had a loose leg and an arm and the eyes had fallen in and the hair had been combed so much that there was hardly any left. Well, I brought the doll back with me to America and I had a woman fix her up. She put on new hair and reattached the arm and leg and put her eyes back in, but she can't close her eyelids anymore. I made a Swedish costume for her but she still has the original little white booties. That doll is over 70 years old now and Amanda has it in her collection.

This is the head to Mom's rag doll. She currently lives on a shelf in my house :)

When I was 12 years old, my mother said, "You're too old to play with dolls" and she took the rag doll. When mother spoke in that tone, you didn't ask questions. I went outside crying. Later I tried to look for the doll on the trash pile -- In those days, every house had its own trash pile out in the back -- but I never found any sign of that doll until years and years later. I found the head up in the skänk up in the attic.  I brought that back to the US with me too.

We really didn't have very many boughten toys but then it started to be popular to have yo-yos and the best kind of yo-yo to have was a star yo-yo. It had a star on both sides. Mom and Dad bought me one for Gunborgdagen one year! That's the third of March. This caught me by such surprise because we never got presents on our namesdays; I don't know what got into them. At any rate, I had a star yo-yo. One time Otto i Boås came to Papa to get help filling in his tax forms; Papa helped many people with this. Well, Otto had never seen a yo-yo so he asked if he could try it. We stood playing with yo-yos there in the kitchen. I handed him my star yo-yo all wound up and ready to go. He made it go some but of course, it didn't quite go up as high each time and the string got longer and longer and Otto wasn't a tall man. He started to jump up as the yo-yo went down so it wouldn't hit the floor. He jumped and jumped and Oh how he laughed. He tried it over and over and never really could master it. Many kids learned how to do all kinds of tricks with yo-yos. I was never that good though.