What's Behind Door #9? A Christmas Surprise!

Thank you everyone for joining us for day 9 of our Advent Calendar Unboxings!

I ended up not going to the meeting after all. Since I had to leave so early to get to it and wouldn't be coming back until the sun went down, and we were going to get more winter weather in the mix I decided to play it safe and not go. I'm bummed to miss the meeting, but I'd rather miss it than have something bad happen because I decided to press my luck. The woman hosting the meeting did float out the idea that we reschedule the meeting since they were going to be getting snow that afternoon too, but the woman in charge of the club shut that down pretty quick (and pretty rudely if you ask me).

I won't lie, that kind of upset me more than not being able to go. My interest in the club has been waning and that just adds to my negative feelings. I do like the club a lot, but in 2016 we lost more than half the club due to several reasons (mostly revolving one person), we went from being around 18 people to really 6. I like everyone who's still in the club but we lost a lot of variety we had. I've been a club member for several years now and after all that I'm back to being the "newest" club member. It just feels very stagnant. I don't plan on quitting especially since there aren't any other options, but at least this way it'll be one less thing to miss when I do decide to move out of state again.

Anyway, rant over. Our day 9 candy door is located on the upper left side just below the number 6 door. It shows the side of the building that squirrel on the rooftop is rapidly approaching.

Opening the door reveals:

A Church! 

I think it's a Church, but now that I'm looking at it, there's really nothing on it that denotes it as such. To me it's very reminiscent of smaller Churches, especially some that I see locally but I am looking at it through an American's viewpoint. It also reminds me of some older style European village houses. I just don't see those like.... ever, so they don't come to mind first when I see them.


Our Barbie calendar door is in the lower right corner, a first for that. It located under the boot of the skiing illustration. We're moving away from the ballerina!

We open the door and find:

A white lab coat! (Was not expecting that)

It's a cute lab coat. It's made from a thin white broadcloth fabric and has contrasting pink stitching. It has 1/2 length sleeves, which I assume are more of a cost cutting feature than a style choice. It's okay, but mine has a lot of sewing errors.

There's several ragged hems, some wonky stitches and excess threads, some puckers to the fabric, and problems with both sleeves. The left sleeve is already starting to come undone at the cuff, and on the right sleeve part of the hem has come out and the raw edge is visible. I might have helped those cuff issues by putting it on the doll body I'm using because the arms and hands on my doll are larger the the doll it came with, (the doll is still totally Mattel made) but I think those issues would have happened to it no matter what I did, but I might have had them happen sooner because my doll had bigger arms.

It's cute but Mattel really should hold themselves to a higher standard. It's already coming apart and I'm not even playing with it.