What Children’s Literature Teaches Us About Money: Maxine Rose Schur’s ‘Samantha’s Surprise’

The person you love the most gets the best gift.

As you might remember from our discussion of Meet Samantha: one of the most important things a young girl can have, whether she is a bright Victorian beauty or a girl from a low-income family who’s trying to fit in at public school, is a roughly 18-inch-high doll that costs the equivalent of $155 in today’s dollars.

You also might remember, from Meet Samantha, that our titular heroine “earns” this doll after a week of piano practice and good behavior, and that she later gives this doll to her less-fortunate friend Nellie.

This means that we begin Samantha’s Surprise with a new doll for Samantha to covet—and in case the stakes weren’t high enough, we learn that Samantha doesn’t have a doll of her own, no doll at all, since she gave that other doll to Nellie.

Which… I can’t believe that. Samantha is a nine-year-old child from a wealthy family. She has a doll. She probably has multiple dolls. (Surely her parents gave her a doll before dying in that boating accident.) What Samantha doesn’t have is a roughly 18-inch-high doll that costs the equivalent of $155 in today’s dollars.

And wow is Samantha feeling that pain.

It’s interesting that even the doll itself reinforces the idea that having a doll is important, because the doll comes with a Nutcracker doll attached to its arm—and the Nutcracker fits into the doll’s arm the way the doll fits into Samantha’s arm the way Samantha fits into a child’s arm, all reiterating that the one thing every young person needs, whether they be child, child’s doll, or child’s doll’s doll, is a roughly 18-inch-high (or proportionally equivalent) doll of their own.

We know without me even having to say it that Samantha gets that doll. (Also, there is apparently only one of those dolls ever, which seems unusual. Didn’t dollmakers have molds? Didn’t we just have a whole Samantha book about the complicated emotions middle-class liberals hold on the realities of mass production?)

The person who gives Samantha the doll is not Grandmary, who has been Samantha’s sole guardian since she was five years old; it’s Cornelia, the “unladylike” and “fun” woman Samantha’s Uncle Gard is courting. (We don’t have time to get into the whole “Cornelia isn’t like other girls” trope, so let’s just state it and be done with it.)

Because of this, Samantha swaps the gifts she plans to give Uncle Gard and Cornelia. She gives the pound of Jolie Chocolates, which she bought specifically because they were Cornelia’s favorite, to Gard. She gives the painstakingly dècoupaged box she’d originally made to hold her uncle’s cufflinks to Cornelia, because it’s her best gift and she wants to give it to the person she loves the most. In her moment of happiness at receiving the 18-inch doll, Samantha decides she loves Cornelia more than Gard.

She never, ever thought about giving that best gift to Grandmary.

Which… wow, just wow, let’s break down all of the things that are terrible about this.

1. Ranking gifts based on “who you love most.” That’s the kind of thing you do when you’re a child and you’ve got a box of grocery store Valentines in front of you and you want to give the best designs to your best friends. That is not what you do at Christmas.
2. What you should do at Christmas is what Samantha originally intended to do: give everyone a gift that’s based on their needs and desires. Cornelia loves Jolie Chocolates—because Cool Girls love to eat—so give her the chocolates already. (You know Gard is going to let her eat most of them anyway.)
3. The whole “dismissing or eliminating the Mother so that the child can come of age in the larger world” is like a Storytelling 101 technique, it is as old as fire, but in Samantha’s case her mother dies and her grandmother, who took on the full-time single parent responsibility of caring for her (with a gob of household help but still), gets to watch as Samantha pretty much ignores her and lavishes all of her love on this younger, more fun couple, who bought her this doll that Samantha didn’t even tell Grandmary she wanted because she assumed Grandmary would say no.

In other words: Grandmary spends Christmas morning discovering that her adopted child had a secret desire that she deliberately chose not to share, that another set of adults were privy to the desire and able to fulfill it, and that Samantha is in the early adolescent stages of breaking away from the immediate family and seeking (and giving) validation elsewhere. Grandmary is a class act throughout, as she always will be.

On the subject of early adolescence: there comes a time in every child’s life when their adorably janky Christmas crafts are no longer the centerpiece of the household’s holiday decorations, and that happens for Samantha this year. Grandmary wants to pay a decorator to put up some legit garlands, not whatever pinecones and cottonballs Samantha glued together, and I’d say there is a perfect developmental parallel between Grandmary making the house less child-centric and Samantha turning her affections towards Gard and Cornelia.

But just because you’re no longer a young child doesn’t mean you can’t covet a beautifully-crafted, 18-inch-high doll—especially if that doll looks like she’s just your age. American Girl fulfills a lot of roles, but those original dolls were exactly what many of us needed to transition from late childhood to early adolescence. They gave us stories in which girls like us—but distanced, because of history—drove the narrative; they let us engage in imaginative play while simultaneously taking ourselves seriously. They were the best gift, and although we might not have realized it at the time, they often came from the people who loved us the most.

Previously:

What Children’s Literature Teaches Us About Money: Susan S. Adler’s ‘Samantha Learns a Lesson’

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