A long, long time ago, when I was but a wee bairn, I had one special Christmas wish...I wanted a doll house. Oh! How wonderful it would be! The child who had no permanent house could revel instead in small abode that could be moved from apartment to apartment! How I yearned for it. My prayer was answered, not by Santa, but by my Aunt Jeanne. Possibly the World's Best Aunt, she bought a colonial doll house kit, painstakingly assembled it and built the furniture. There it sat, under the tree on Christmas morning, my all-time favorite Christmas present. How I loved that house! Over the course of time the homemade furniture was replaced by fancier, store-bought pieces. It became a ritual. When ever I'd come to visit Aunt Jeanne would take me to the doll house store in Brooklyn and we'd pick out a little porcelain kitty cat or a lamp or some miniature peas and carrots in a bowl. I didn't like the bendable plastic family that lived in the house, so I evicted them and set up house with a baby I named "Froggy" and a menagerie of dogs, cats, and other assorted house pets. We decided to keep the house at my aunt's, that way I had a really good toy to play with when I came to visit, which was often.