Nobody in town remembers exactly when they stopped using my given name. It was somewhere around the Christmas I made a hundred and fifty dolls.
It began small. A neighbor asked if I could make just one doll — a gift for a child who wouldn't have much waiting for her that year. I said yes, sat down at the table with my needle and thread, and found I couldn't stop. Word got around our little Vermont town, the kind of place where everyone still cuts their own Christmas tree from the same snowy lot every December. By the time the snow had really settled in, every table in my house was covered in dolls — a hundred and fifty of them, each one a little different from the last.
On Christmas morning, children all over town found a doll waiting for them under the tree. I don't know that anyone planned for it to change anything. But it did — it gave the whole town something to be part of, and it gave me a new name. Grandma. Not just to my own grandchildren, but to everyone.
Years later, I started writing down the stories behind the dolls — who made them, where they came from, who loved them first. That's the seed the Family Books grew from: a series about grandmothers gifting granddaughters a doll from a different country in every story, starting right here with that Vermont Christmas.
The Emporium is everything that grew up around it — storybooks for the young ones, a quieter shelf of keepsake titles for the grown-ups, and a wall of poster art standing alongside a few of the real dolls I made with my own hands, all those years ago.
— Grandma