It's winter time in the northern hemisphere. Down here for me it is summer, and we've been sweating through heat over 100 degrees. (My Christmas gift to you all is translating that into Fahrenheit for you - it's over 38 for those who use Celsius.) But we've been keeping cool looking at all the Christmas marketing that comes out of the northern hemisphere and is filled with snowflakes and other wintery imagery.
So why not further that with some wintery Barbies!
One that stands out to me but which I haven't talked about before is 2001's Winter Classic Barbie, a Barbie with a name so indistinct that it could be literally anything. In this case, it's a Barbie in a gown with faux fur accessories.
She looks very much like a lot of dolls from the late 90s and early 00s - by which I mean, she's got that same face that a lot of the special editions from this era do, and looks like she could be on the cusp of being either a fancy playline doll or a collectible.
Another, from four years earlier in 1997, Winter Dazzle, fits this description too. You could tell me this doll was a playline doll, or a collectible, and I would believe you either way.
In this case, though, she's wearing a cute little pink outfit with fur cuffs.
One of the interesting things about Winter Dazzle, though, is that she is branded General Mills.
I looked up General Mills, thinking maybe I just didn't know what it was - but yeah, it's a food company. I looked a little further into it, and she was actually a tie-in product with General Mills: if you sent in a certain number of barcodes from General Mills products, you would receive her in the mail. I think this is cute, especially given she isn't a tie-in for their product. They easily could have done a Barbie themed around a food product (after all, there's been milk Barbies, Oreo Barbies, all sorts of things) but they chose not to.
