We are in the holiday month. If December were an approach being flown into an airport, this week would be our downwind leg, as we prepared to turn and make the crosswind leg next week and then the final on the last few days before Christmas. As the last days approach, many are sweating them out like Robert Hays in the movie Airplane, perspiring a river over holiday gift-giving and the like. Surely there must be a less-stressful way to navigate through the holiday terrain without "crashing and burning."

Come with me to the museum and step back through the portal of time to a more relaxed, more bucolic age. Several items are available for your inspection that would make excellent gifts, even today.

For those who are concerned with the self-image that is validated by impossibly proportioned figures such as "Barbie," I recommend examination of the doll collection here. Each of them appears quite well fed and in no need of an imminent transfusion to keep from wasting away. They are dressed in turn-of-the-century fashions that have become fashionable again in recent years. These are no "action figures" and are no mechanical conversationalists, so you will have to decide that dolls, like children, should be "seen and not heard."

To make the familial fantasy complete, consider the miniature china set on display. It has plates, glasses, cups and saucers enough for an entire family of "little women," plus gravy boats, meat platters, butter dishes, oil lanterns and even a miniature coffee mill. The meal could even be prepared on a miniature wood stove, a salesman's sample that is complete with all of its doors and eyes fully functioning.

Come and see this piece of history and others in "Granny's Attic," the Belhaven Memorial Museum.

Belhaven Treasure #30

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