June 3: Dolls

Broken Dolls Day is celebrated on 3 June in Japan. It's a Buddhist ritual for little girls. Girls attend Buddhist funeral ceremonies in which they bury their old dolls. Here are ten facts about dolls.

1. Dolls are possibly the earliest type of children's toy - wooden dolls dating back to the 21st century BC have been found in Egyptian tombs. There have also been ancient dolls found made from clay, stone, bone, ivory, leather, or wax. There may have been cloth dolls, too, but none of these have survived. The oldest rag dolls date back to 300 BC, in Rome.
2. In some cultures, dolls were more than just playthings for children - they had spiritual, magical and ritual value. Sometimes, dolls which had been used for rituals were given to children to play with afterwards; in other cultures dolls were deemed to special and holy to be played with. Which brings us to voodoo dolls. The idea of people sticking pins in effigies as part of a spell to make someone suffer isn't actually a feature of the Haitian Vodou religion. Popular culture has made this connection, and the main function of voodoo dolls to the Haitian people is to make money out of selling them to tourists. European witchcraft, however, did make use of effigies to cast spells on people, using dolls known as "poppets" (which makes "Poppet" as a term of endearment a little sinister, if you ask me!) There was also an African equivalent called a nkisi or bocio.
3. In North America, the Amish people are known for making rag dolls with no faces. They are said to have originated when someone gave a young Amish girl a normal doll with a face for Christmas. Her father was enraged, because it violated the commandment against graven images. "Only God can make people," he declared, cut the doll's head off and replaced it with a faceless stuffed stocking. The child was apparently not too upset, and played with the doll for many years.
4. In the early days, dolls eyes were usually Brown. Blue eyes only became popular in the Victorian era, because Queen Victoria had blue eyes.
5. At that time, porcelain or bisque dolls were popular. They are still popular among collectors today. A bisque doll made by French manufacturers Bru and Jumeau could set you back almost $22,000. The most expensive bisque doll ever sold went for £242,500.
6. Then there are Russian dolls, wooden figures with a series of smaller figures nesting inside. Often wrongly referred to as Babouska dolls, the correct name for them is Matryoshka dolls. The name literally means, "Little Matron". The outside doll is usually portrayed as a woman in traditional peasant dress and the smallest doll is often portayed as a tiny baby. Vasily Zvyozdochkin made the first Matryoshka dolls in 1890. There has been a tradition in Russia to make sets of dolls representing Russian leaders, with the current one on the outside and their predecessors as the smaller dolls inside. The largest set of matryoshka dolls in the world was made by Youlia Bereznitskaia in 2003. There are 51 of them. The outside doll is 53.97 centimetres (21.25 in) and the little one in the middle is 0.31 centimetres (0.12 in).
7. Some people find dolls creepy. The word for a fear of dolls is “pediophobia”. Psychologists like Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud, and more recently Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori have studied the tendency to find dolls, and in the case of Mori, robots, creepy. It may stem from an uncertainty about whether something is human or not. If it obviously isn't, its human characteristics stand out and will be considered cute. The more realistic a doll or robot becomes, the more people will notice the non-human characteristics and find them disturbing. Feeling slightly creeped out or disturbed rather than having a full-blown phobia is known as the uncanny valley effect.
8. Workshops for fixing broken dolls known as "doll hospitals" have been around since 1830, when one was founded in Lisbon. In 1888, another was set up in Melbourne, Australia. Most of the clients of such establishments, however, are not children, but adults in their 50s and 60s.
9. In some cultures, when a girl reaches puberty there are ceremonies in which they formally give up their dolls, because as adults, they no longer need them. In Greece and Rome, boys dedicated their toys to the gods when they reached puberty; Girls dedicated theirs to the goddesses when they married. In parts of Latin America a ritual called is known as La última muñeca, or "the last doll", where a girl relinquishes one of her dolls, is part of the celebration of a girl's 15th birthday.
10. There has even been a doll in space. Stargazer Lottie Doll was the first doll to go into space. She was designed by a 6 year old Canadian girl and spent 264 days aboard the International Space Station during the Principa Mission.