Dear American Girl Doll,

I have just finished perusing your holiday catalogue and I would just like to inform you that I will be buying everything. Which is to say that I will actually be buying nothing. Trust, I would rather purchase all the things that you hawk through the consumer periodical with the twinkly-eyed dolls that you send just often enough to ensure I haven't forgotten about you, and just infrequent enough that I haven't yet found a sugardaddy gotten a second job to finance my American Girl habit. For my daughter, of course. I mean, all of this is STRICTLY FOR HER.

Oh but how I want to own your whole collection of historical character dolls that inhabit stories set during important times in America’s past. As an academic, I consider this sort of educational play very important {FOR MY DAUGHTER.} Also, I think the cupcake bakeset is just kind of beast? I mean, again, for young girls. Not for me to play with whilst imagining my own New York loft where I would launch my own cupcake delivery post-dot-com start-up. And let's not forget the appeal of the contemporary Girl of the Year® stories, exploring issues of today. From these I believe girls learn they can do great things if they believe in themselves, which speaks to me as a child of the '80s who was all about self-esteem. Oh flip, your whole company is only turning 25 years old this year? Which means, like, I am not only old enough to be the mother of all of your dolls but freaking your company's older sister that wouldn't even have gone to the same school as you because I would have been in high school already, so it's almost like you would have been an only child if we had the same parents?

Hey, but nice job with the release of the new New Orleans circa 1853 dolls, Cecile and Marie-Grace. I had fun turning to page 30 to discover their world. I mean. Hey, nice visual spread on page 30--wow! That was really convincing.

Yours very sincerely, An American Girl who has been good all year,

Kendra Chattanooga, TN