It’s hard to imagine receiving a 1,300-page publication in your mailbox. That’s about the size of the Sears & Roebuck catalogs that arrived in the spring and fall of each year in the 1950s. We not only studied pages of unimaginable fashions and merchandise, but my sister and I cut out pictures of fashion models and turned them into paper dolls. We were especially drawn to the underwear section. With these paper characters, we imagined adventures that took place over, under and around an old unused pedal sewing machine in our front hallway. The Christmas catalogue was smaller with mostly toys. Pages upon pages of dolls, cap pistols, Annie Oakley costumes, music boxes and such enticed us into euphoric dreams of materialistic delight. It took days to decide on a toy we dared request for Christmas. One year we were smitten by a doll house with furniture. It seemed perfect for playing paper dolls. To our delight, it appeared under the tree on Christmas Eve. Santa came to our house while we were in the back yard shooting firecrackers. We thought we had stepped into heaven. There were tiny rooms, doors and plastic furniture. Wonderful! But after days of playing with it, we lost interest. As much as it had been desired and hoped for, the doll house was too cramped. Too solid. Too perfect. It wasn’t the right idea for our paper dolls. We went back to the old treadle sewing machine.