In honor of the season, a holiday shopping post.

I can’t think of a time my sister and I have disagreed on anything parenting-related. Not to one another’s faces, anyway. But this American Girl thing is tough.

It started with Hanukkah. Jenny wanted to know what she could buy the girls.

Well, I told her, they’d like something for their American Girl dolls; Annabelle would love something nature-related and Sophie really wants the wheelchair.

Jenny seemed fine with that, til she got inside the store and the text messages started flying. I knew she wasn’t thrilled earlier this year when AG opened in her city, Denver, but I figured after several months she’d have gotten over it. Apparently not.

“This goes against every ounce of me,” she wrote.

“The wheelchair?” I replied. I knew what she meant. It’s sort of creepy that Sophie wants a wheelchair.

But that’s not what she meant.

“yes,” came the sarcastic reply. “didnt u know i dont like disabled people? american girl!”

Oh. Whoops. That was a little embarrassing, even in front of your sister.

“woohoo channukah for the girls is done. big mistake was letting kate come to amer girl. she’s obsessed.:(”

Kate is my 7-year-old niece. The texts kept coming.

“truthfully the american doll thing is f-ed up. grown women drooling over dolls ick.”

“No one is offering to buy YOU one,” I answered.

“true…but kate has hers picked out. jonathan is going to KILL me. By the way I added a book to the gift box to make myself feel better. the wheel chair helped. when is the doll with A or DS coming out?”

Yeah, I can’t imagine an American Girl with autism or Down syndrome will be hitting the shelves any time soon. But at least they don’t have collagen-injected lips. One did get bullied. There’s even a homeless one! And I know it’s like saying you read Playboy for the articles, but I really do love those American Girl books.

I just don’t see that the doll thing is such a big deal. Yes, you can go overboard with AG — just like you can go overboard with a lot of things. (Really, what the fuck are our kids doing with $150 iPod nanos???)

I do suppose (see picture above) I could compel my girls to take better care of their dolls. I really only meant for them to have one each, til the Jewish one, Rebecca, came out — then what was I to do? So now we have several floating around the house, and a Rubbermaid I try (mostly in vain) to keep packed with all the accessories, so they don’t get lost.

So shoot me. I’ve done far worse as a parent — and I’ll do far worse. At least I haven’t bought my niece Kate an American Girl doll. But apparently my sister’s about to cave.

“oh i am strong. we left with nothing. she has to wait a whole 3 weeks for hannukah. go me.”

My husband discovered WalMart this year, which means that now, post-Christmas, there’s a lot of cheap plastic in the house (all given with great love; he was excited to shower the girls with gifts) but Santa brought a few notable items, as well.

Annabelle received ZhuZhu pets (again, procured by Ray, who was smart enough to spot a trend months early — he hid them for a long time) and she’s thrilled, though I’ve already seen one of those f-ers eat a hunk of my niece’s hair and they’re a little too rat-like for my taste.

Sophie’s most pleased with the whoopie cushion Santa stuffed in the bottom of her stocking, but I’m fond of Gwen, the American Girl doll he left. Sophie requested a doll that looked just like her, and coincidentally, Gwen does (except for her brown eyes, which Sophie hasn’t noticed).

Gwen also happens to be homeless. Yes, you read that right. I’ve known about Gwen for a few months, ever since Sophie received Chrissa, American Girl of the Year, 2009. That means Chrissa comes with her own movie and storyline — she gets bullied — and friends you can buy, like Gwen, who has a side story of her own: Her family is homeless, a secret kept til the end of the movie.

When I saw the movie, I thought it was nice, if a bit contrived, that AG would do the homeless thing. Not a big deal to me. (And to be honest, Sophie’s pretty sophisticated, but she’s not going to get that one.)

But it turns out Gwen’s caused some trouble, explored in this NPR piece from earlier this year. 

Rest assured, Gwen now has a home. In fact, I wanted to photograph Sophie and her look-alike this morning, but I was informed that Gwen was asleep in Sophie’s bed and unavailable for a photo session. So I’ve posted a photo of her from the AG site.  

They haven’t announced the American Girl of the year for 2010 yet, but hints have arrived — apparently she’s “outdoorsy”. To be honest, I wouldn’t mind seeing an American Girl with Down syndrome. Now that would be controversial.

You know those friends — friends you can go years without seeing, but when you do see them, it’s like no time has passed?

That’s my friend Heather. Love her. Loveherloveherloveher. We met as undergrads and somehow 20-plus years passed and here we are. After college she went to law school and met a cute boy and and suddenly we’re all old married people with kids. We wedged in a visit for a couple hours when Ray and the girls and I made our way through Los Angeles at the end of our epic road trip earlier this month.

As Heather put it, the hurried lunch at the old farmer’s market near the CBS studios (oh my gosh, I love going to that farmer’s market — it’s pretty much as it has been for decades, I imagine, even with Donna Parker visited in “Donna Parker Goes to Hollywood,” one of my all-time favorite books; Donna was a Nancy Drew wanna be and a reporter for her high school newspaper — major nerd alert) was a tease — it only made us both want a proper visit — but “dessert” was very satisfying: a trip to the American Girl store.

I’m so old, I missed the first round of American Girl action. (That, or they just weren’t big in Phoenix in the 70s.) Our babysitters all had them. My first introduction to the concept actually came at Heather’s house, years ago. Her daughter Ava, who’s about a year and a half older than Annabelle (funny, at the time Annabelle was born it felt like Heather had a teenager, that’s how skewed your perspective of time gets as a new parent) has more than one doll, and a trunk of clothing and accessories. Heather highly recommended AG as a nice alternative to Barbies and the big-lipped Bratz dolls that freak me out. (Actually, I don’t know anyone who’s not freaked out by them.)

Some of the toy options for little kids are downright scary. I recall vividly that on her second birthday, Annabelle received Rio de Janeiro Barbie as a gift, and since the gift came from one of our sitters, I couldn’t do what I normally do with a gift I don’t approve of and stick it straight into the giveaway bag. The sitter would have noticed. So I gave Annabelle the Barbie, which she promptly stripped to her birthday suit and turquoise blue pumps.

Barbie is always standing on her tip toes, ready for heels. I don’t believe they make anything but flats for the American Girl. Not that I’m worried my kid will become a slut because she likes to play with naked dolls in f***-me pumps, but still, it just seems a little unsavory once you’ve been introduced to the world of the American Girl.

And what a world it is. Last holiday season, we finally brought Mia (Girl of the Year, an ice skater with beautiful blonde hair) into the family. She was followed this summer by Chrissa for Sophie (another Girl of the Year, she’s a swimmer who gets bullied at school) and Rebecca (I wasn’t going to get Annabelle another doll, but then they introduced a Jewish American Girl  — so what was I supposed to do when she asked for it?!)

The dolls aren’t cheap, and the clothes are downright outrageous. I devoted a Rubbermaid to them in a recent fit of organizing, and plan to hold onto the loot and oversee all play sessions involving American Girl accessories, in order to protect my investment from drifting to the bottom of various toy baskets, never to be seen whole — or clean — again.

Catalogue and online shopping don’t compare, I realized, as I passed through the doors of the Los Angeles American Girl store that Saturday afternoon. I’d been to the store in New York this summer, but alone, and only for five minutes to grab the latest dolls. This time we went all the way to the back — to the hair salon.

Yes, the hair salon. You can see it in the photo at the top of this post — a row of teeny tiny chairs, with full-sized women busily combing out the mess your kid has made of her doll’s hair. I got out of the hair part cheap, for $15, since Annabelle didn’t desire an updo for Rebecca. I’d already heard about the cafe where your AG doll sits next to you in a chair made just for her (I don’t know if they serve the dolls fake food, we didn’t eat there) but I hadn’t heard about the doll holders in the ladies room.

Yes, the doll holders. You can use the toilet without worrying about where to put your doll.

At least they didn’t have doll-sized toilets. In fact, despite the fact that the shopping trip cost me a small fortune, nothing about the American Girl experience was really so outrageous.

Or maybe it’s just that I bowed to oh-so-gentle peer pressure from Heather and Ava. That’s okay. I’ll take all the influence I can, from that family. I only wish we lived closer. But with that American Girl store just minutes from Heather’s house, I’m sure we’ll be back soon. I’ll start saving now.

I am home. I mean it.

And that’s saying something, considering I spent the last 2 and a half days in New York City, the place I always assumed I’d call home, from the time I saw Sesame Street — followed by a life-long barrage of manufactured scenes set in a city far more glamorous than my own hometown.

New York is a dangerous place for me. Ray and I brought the girls in 2007 and before that, I don’t think I’d been at all since 1999. Going alone was a big deal — it meant staying not just at a funky hotel but inside my own funky head. I didn’t have a choice. The boss ordered it. It was very nice of him; one of my writers won a big, huge journalism award and the boss sweetly acknowledged the importance of editors by asking me to attend.

So I picked the risotto (or was it orzo?) from around a big piece of salmon (no one at the Yale Club got the memo about my fish phobia, obviously) and made small talk. (And lamented the fact that in just a short year, my newspaper has shorted the commitment to telling long, hard stories and focused instead on blogging, which for me has a place — right here. But not right there, not in the Yale Club with the NYT and the WSJ and a bunch of other serious journalists. That’s a topic for different day.)

The luncheon was fine, as I knew it would be. It was the rest of the trip I had worried about. Would I have a breakdown in the Village, swoon on 5th Avenue, disolve into a puddle of tears at Columbus Circle? I padded the awards luncheon with a day on either end — of course, I was flying across the country! psyche be damned! — and topping my alterna-agenda was meeting Maya, my fellow mom blogger, mother of Leo and Ellie and a real kindred spirit.

The meeting was terrific. Maya did what I meant to do — she grew up across the country, moved to New York for grad school, and now she works in the city, even with two kids (one with DS) and all that entails. (The story’s longer than that, but that’s basically it.) But I didn’t hate her, not one little bit, and if you know her, you know why. That is one cool chick.

I spent time with another cool chick, Amy, my best friend from second grade. (And no, this is not a coy reference back to the in-my-head thing. Her name really is Amy. Another Amy S., in fact.)

Amy also vowed to move to New York after college, but she made it stick. She was my welcome wagon during my brief time in the city — I’ll never forget the image of her walking her fast NYC walk up Broadway, carrying a little house plant to welcome me in 1990. I was scared shitless, which is probably a big part of why I was gone by 1991. All talk, little action.

Not Amy. She is as fabulous as any character Candace Bushnell could conjure (and hey, at the moment, she’s single! The most desirable bachelorette in the city, so let me know if you know any eligible men) and just as complicated — in a good way. She got the last good job in finance and a breathtaking (seriously, I was drooling) office view of Central Park and the roof of the Plaza and, as it turns out, she lives around the corner from a kiddie restaurant with a bar called Sweetie Pie. Which is how we found ourselves on a Tuesday night, sitting together in a gilded cage, eating teeny tiny ice cream cones and talking.

So sad but true: My “to do” list for New York pretty much consisted of stuff I’d read about. That’s not to say it wasn’t worth the trip. Papabubble, a candy store I saw in Martha Stewart Living, was sooooo cool, and so was I, for locating it (with some advice from Amy). Even the American Girl doll I had to get for Annabelle was Rebecca — the new Jew on the AG block, was featured in the Sunday Style section a couple weeks ago. (Sophie got one too, Chrissa; so far she’s only talked about giving her a haircut.)

I was craving Chinese, since I was in the middle of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, which I highly recommend, so we hit an Empire Szechuan. (And it was there that we got all-too telling fortunes. Fancy Amy’s said something about pleasures to come, and her Chinese word was “wait”. Mine read, “Hugs are life’s rainbows.” My word was “friend.” We had a good laugh.)

But it was Sweetie Pie, featured in a recent issue of Elle, that really took the cake, or, rather, the bite-sized, perfectly appointed lemon cake on Amy’s fancy mismatched china plate. Menu aside (I really didn’t look at it, except for cocktails and dessert) it’s my all-time dream restaurant: All fuscia banquettes and white wrought iron, an Alice in Wonderland “Open Me” faux door to the bathroom and the aforementioned cage.

We felt like idiots and people kept staring in, but what better place, I decided later, to face the truth of one’s obsession with a fake existence, than in a gigantic bird cage in the West Village?

Of course, for Amy, it’s not fake at all. It really is her life. Walking to the theater the next night (August: Osage County — it was terrific) I sighed and said, “I wouldn’t do this if I lived here, right? You don’t go to the theater every night, do you?”

Well, she admitted, she goes pretty often. And she’d already been to the bar at Sweetie Pie, even before I hit town with my magazine clippings. Amy lives the life. Maya lives it, although I know she doesn’t get to the theater as often as Amy. Still.  The couple I saw walking through the East Village with a carriage holding what was unmistakably a baby with Down syndrome, they live it, even though I always tell myself, “You just can’t think about living in New York, not with your situation.”

Ray is the one who didn’t want to live there, back when I still had the guts to do it. Now he brings it up from time to time. But you know, despite my concerns about breakdowns beforehand and maybe a tear or two at Central Park South, while on the phone with my mom, it turns out I really was okay with saying hello — and goodbye — to my favorite city. At this point, I’d almost rather enjoy it through the media, though I vowed to return much sooner next time, with a new to do list.

I came home to to a beautiful card from Annabelle, who doesn’t know a thing about my struggles with New York — except maybe by osmosis. 

“Welcome Home” it said in big letters, and in smaller script below, “Home is Where the Heart is.”

(I keep telling you, Annabelle’s become the adult in our relationship. And don’t you think her art –below — belongs on the walls of the Sweetie Pie bathroom, along with the piece at the top of this post?)

Next up: a family trip to New York City. That birdcage seats four.