Unwrapping the Antichristmas: Living Dead Dolls Variant Nohell by Mezco Toyz

LDD has its selection of wintry dolls and a few which are specifically Christmas releases, but this character is LDD's most directly Christmasy character design-- Nohell, a creepy little girl in a Santa hat. 

There were two variants of Nohell with drastically different tones. Main-release Nohell was a blonde girl in a very cute retro sweater and skirt.

Variant Nohell is a black-haired girl with bangs and a velvet Santa dress.

The main doll is squarely in the territory of kitsch, with a cartoonier look that reminds one of a child's Christmas decor from the 1950s, while variant Nohell is in the realm of fancy vintage, akin to pseudo-Victorian decorations at high-end "mom decor" shops. Main Nohell is a gremlin while the variant is a ghost. Alternatively--variant Nohell is Christmas Eve, while main Nohell is Christmas Day. I could fully believe that as a conscious direction for the two variants.

I've previously been fairly ambivalent about Nohell. None of LDD's Christmas dolls really grabbed me anyway, but I struggled with Nohell's creepy snowflake eye design on her main doll, since I thought it looked pretty ill-suited to her retro look. Surely a cartoony classic LDD eye would be better?

Maybe so, maybe not. I think I've come around to main Nohell as she is now, and I've definitely gotten more fond of retro Christmas kitsch over time, so I can definitely see myself getting this doll...another time. I'm less consumed with doubt over her than I am with a different Christmas LDD who I didn't put into this project. There's one holiday doll I might get using Christmas gift money, should I get some, but I don't think I'll need main Nohell in 2024. Unless...

Regardless, Variant Nohell was more immediately agreeable to me. Her more vintage and chilling look was fun, and while my bedroom does Christmas more in the "toyland kitsch" tone, and main Nohell has a great sense of fun and brightness, the rest of my Christmas house is more "elegant vintage" in a way that would flatter variant Nohell very nicely for photography. I thought she'd be a fun piece of decoration to set the season with. 

Nohell's name is slightly awkward to me. It's a clear pun on "Noel" (French for "Christmas"), with the sinister "Hell" thrown in, but I don't know exactly what the pronunciation would be. "No hell" doesn't really flow, but I could easily accept her name being pronounced identically to "Noel", silent "h" and all, with the spelling being the difference. It also suits the name better, since if her name is pronounced "no hell" then that suggests her name means "no hell", and what's that about? If there's no Hell, then where are these LDD demons coming from? If there's one thing that's certain about the LDD universe, it's that Hell exists! I think it makes the most sense to pronounce her name "Noel" like normal, and view the spelling as just an edgy alteration and not a literal phrase of two words.

While she got out of the coffin for Sadie's gift discovery, my Nohell arrived sealed.

Nohell's coffin is the same between variants and is a unique color in the brand, being made a white tone, and it also has unique metallic print--green on the clear lid, red on the opaque one. The back of the coffin body used mixed red and green.

Nohell's is one of five unique solid-color divergent LDD coffin styles. I've already shown the orange with black print used for Sweet Tooth (and Jack O Lantern before her), and a couple of silvers, which were used for Series 5's dolls and Series 25's. The other colors are solid red (used for the Toy Soldier and Rose, though likely with different printing colors on each) and solid blue (used for Violet, Valentine counterpart to Rose). The Toy Soldier is the doll I'm thinking might be a postscript holiday entry this year, but I'm not committed yet. Despite his holiday release, he's not strictly Christmas, so he works for an acquisition and  review after the 25th passes.

I've encountered Nohell's coffin before, as the disparate packaging for the loose Viv I got who had been baking in a gasoline garage. 

Nohell's Nohell coffin is in exceedingly better condition, though the base color is the same creamy eggnog shade. I don't imagine this coffin was ever designed to be brilliant snowy white. Viv's copy of the coffin was clearly discolored by very poor storage, but Nohell's copy of her own coffin can't be far removed from its appearance in 2010. The Viv copy of the coffin was not worth keeping, so I sacrificed it for my cross-section burial photo concept with Chloe, a picture I'm still very proud of.

After this photoshoot, I tossed the coffin in recycling. If I was disgusted enough to try to burn the coffin, I probably would have created a dangerous fireball!

Nohell uses red coffin tissue, which is all proper for her theme. The Toy Soldier, with his red coffin, uses green tissue instead for the same festive effect.

The variant doll's coffin lid has a sticker marking her as a Mezco Direct exclusive. 

Nohell's chipboard is decorated with an image of a cracked ornament smeared with blood spelling her name.

I'd never seen Nohell's poems before because they're not documented on the LDD site, so I had no idea if she had much greater lore beyond being a creepy Christmas girl. ....She doesn't, but that's fine. The chipboard poem, is, appropriately, written in the form and cadence of the Christmas carol "The First Noel", though the meter isn't quite the same.

This doll Nohell, was no angel they say

She would break all the other toys aboard Santa's sleigh

And while all the children are all fast asleep

On a cold winter's night down your chimney she'll creep

Nohell, Nohell, Nohell, Nohell

Beware the doll who rings death's bell

Let's get that more singable to the original tune.

The cursed Nohell, to Satan did pray

For the chance to wreak havoc before Christmas Day

While the children were asleep

She crept, quick as can be

And she slaughtered the presents beneath the big tree

Nohell, Nohell, Nohell, Nohell

Scorn of the winter in jingle bells!

There's a typo on the certificate, so Nohell died on "Decemder" 25th, 1957. A Christmas death makes perfect sense for her, and the 1957 year rings especially on-target for her main doll's costume aesthetic. 

Her poem here says:

Some dolls are meant to bring kids joy

But Nohell is a doll unlike any other toy

Made from spoiled milk and blackened coal

Ruining the holidays is her ultimate goal

And a rewrite.

The dolls sent by Santa bring nothing but cheer

But the dolls made by Satan bring nothing but fear

Nohell is his foulest, like spoiled eggnog

With a heart made of coal from a sinner's Yule log

I was excited to read a note on the LDD archive that Nohell's variant doll included some manner of Christmas stocking! I had never noticed this tidbit and felt ever more validated for my choice of edition! While I'm not a huge fan of blind mystery toys, I'm absolutely down for a supplemental surprise thrown into a toy I know I'm getting. LDD has done a gift box with a small item inside for birthday-themed Jubilee, so I was wondering, fully under the impression this stocking was a miniature/accessory for Nohell, if it was a working fabric piece with something inside. Even if not, its design and size and material intrigued me immensely. I remember being excited and let down by a gimmick in the DC Super Hero Girls dolls where they had mystery capes and a rare gold version...but the cape in practice was extremely short unfinished stretch fabric with an ugly appliqué logo on the back. I was hoping Nohell's stocking, however it was, would be worth it.

Of course, you've already seen it, and so there was no possible way to be disappointed by the truth. I think I gasped when I flipped over her coffin tray. I know I audibly said "no way." 

It's huuuuuuuge!

Okay, maybe not huge by human standards, but Mezco, are you kidding me?!?! I didn't expect a freakin' human-scale stocking to begin with!!!  This is nuts!!! You can absolutely pop a whole doll, such as Nohell herself, inside! 

She'll fit all the way down to be fully hidden, too.

The stocking has fake-fur white trim and a simple black fabric printed with applique of the LDD logo in red above the LDD logo skull and crossed candy canes replacing bones. This symbol is a little lost on the variant doll, but it's what's on the main doll's skirt. Maybe a little odd that the stocking and matching Nohell are separated. 

I replaced the original hanging loop with a cord tied in a noose at the end since I thought it fit and served for a pun about the stocking being hanged by the chimney with care.

The stocking fabrics aren't spectacular, and the piece really likes to hang at an angle and tip anything poking out of the top to the side when it's stuffed, so it's not the world's best stocking, but the sheer wow factor of getting a human-usable big stocking piece that holds a full doll (sans coffin) is spectacle enough to make this a strong contender for best LDD human-use bonus piece ever packed into a coffin. (Its competition is the good-luck charm assembled from Series 13's dolls, the pendant assembled from Rose and Violet, and the small gift inside Jubilee's birthday present). What a treat. It also served as a great dressing for the DEADvent corner.

I was glad to ride the high of the wonderful stocking, because I needed the boost in mood--both of Nohell's hips were stuck and one of her pegs broke, just like with my Chloe...though hers are black plastic that I thought would be stronger! 

Maybe stark-white girls with black hair and costumes with red and bows don't fare well?

I'm planning to pop the ball out of the leg and repair the peg, heat the legs and pop both off, and trim the sockets for a less harsh fit. Fingers crossed. I'd previously learned my lesson and averted disaster in this situation on another occasion, but forgot to stop trying to move the joint and loosen the legs with heat this time. Ugh.

Don't tell Sadie. 

Here's the doll unboxed.

Nohell's Santa hat is made of shiny red velvet and is sewn into a bent shape. The brim is trimmed with white fur and the tail is long and ends on a white pom-pom. It's all very proper. 

The hat just slides around her head snug, and doesn't have any chin strap system. Two elastics did keep the hat on for packaging. It looks like main Nohell's hat is sewn identically, but the red fabric is closer to felt or fleece and is less ritzy in aesthetic.

Nohell's hair is a black bob haircut with a curve inward and bangs. While the bangs look very sloped, they evened out more later when boiled and combed.

An identical hairstyle would appear on She Who Can Not Be Named in Series 29, and it also appeared on Violet. Main Nohell has a side part rather than bangs. I like pictures where variant Nohell's bangs cover her brows and make her more blank and spooky, but this one's don't appear capable of hanging that low. That's okay. I can leverage her hat to hide her brows for the same effect. While Nohell's hair is messy, it feels okay and has no gel in it. The rooting isn't super thick, perhaps for the benefit of the hat, but it doesn't look sparse visually.

Her skin is stark white, though not as white as her costume accents. I'm not inclined to believe this is the result of aging. It probably was always this way. Her main doll appears to be the same color, but the aesthetic and hair create quite a difference between the two.

Nohell's eyes are black voids with white snowflakes filling them for pupils and/or irises. It's a striking surreal creepy design, and I think it's her greatest strength. On the main doll, it might feel out of place--at least, it did for long enough for me to favor and select the variant. Variant Nohell also has icy blue color to shade her eyes and her lips, which makes her even eerier. The eye shading is not airbrushed--it's fully opaque and solid, but it has a blurred fade at the edges. 

Nohell has wicked arched eyebrows, though they're less steep than most LDD brows. Her face can be read as a sinister confident smile, but her colors and paint give her such an ominous, gloomy air that she looks less smiley than the main Nohell to me. Main Nohell is more impish, and even if you see a smirk on this variant, it's less fun and more dangerous. The eye snowflakes are pretty impressive.

Nohell's Santa dress has a wide neckline, long sleeves and furry cuffs, and a fur-trimmed hem. The dress has a high waist seam and a flaring triangular skirt that ends above the knee. Around the waist, she has a ribbon tied in a bow which encircles a gold-colored circular Santa-buckle accent. The wide neck and high skirt are less modest than a really old-fashioned vintage dress might look, but the Santa dress is more of a modern concept anyhow, and it's a successful design. I like a Santa dress that's just there to be cute rather than to be a sexualized thing.

The dress is made of the same fabrics as her hat, but it's a little messy. Some of the red color seems to have seeped into the fuzzy cuffs (thankfully, it's more visible on the inside), and there were some loose threads. While the edge of the neck is finished, the edge of the seam is exposed and I worry about fraying. The high-waist belt ribbon is also not perfectly straight or centered, though I like the use of a bow and a round buckle for festive touches. The bow is more purple-toned than the red of the dress. The dress velcros down the back like usual. The cuffs are very tight and difficult to slide her hands back through for redressing, and I worried about breaking the fabric, but I fortunately did not.

Nohell wears white boots with black soles, and fur is glued to the edge, as well as two strings on each. This is very similar to how Frozen Charlotte's boots were done back in Series 12, but the bobbles on the end of the boot strings here are actual jingle bells! Nohell really jingles, and I don't know why that's so ridiculously charming to me. 

Have a listen:

Variant Nohell's LDD portrait shows the bells being silver in contrast to the main doll's gold, but evidently, both Nohells were produced with the same gold bells. While silver would suit the frosty, eerie look of variant Nohell (and invoke the "Silver Bells" carol), the buckle on her dress is gold and the bells match it well, so I have no complaints.

I was pleasantly surprised to find white socks inside the boots keeping them firm on her feet. The boots themselves are both flexible and tight, making them a real pull to put back on. 

Nohell's vinyl seemed like it might be a little more firm than normal, with none of her pieces being flexible without heating. With her legs, the grip around the ball on each side was too tight, leading to neither working right-- her left hip peg fractured like Chloe's and the right twisted out of the socket like Betsy's. So basically, my struggles with two separate nightmares in one single doll. Yay.

I softened Nohell's legs with heat and popped the balls out of the legs by using a screwdriver as leverage. I was very surprised to see the hip balls were covered in small spiky nubs, which seemed like an inherently poor idea to me.

Surely this couldn't have made the legs any more mobile, and could have been a contributing impediment toward both of her hips being stuck!

I can't confirm if later dolls had these spikes because I haven't popped legs off the ball joints of anybody past Nohell in the brand chronology, but none of them had such severe hip mobility issues. I know no other LDD ball joints have seemed to have spikes on other parts of the body--I've popped out arms and heads several times and never seen this, and I even popped out Nohell's head for a photo later and that was a smooth ball. 

Repair was a bit of a trial and error process, but despite the awful hand I had been dealt, I actually had much better success than I did with Chloe or Betsy!

The complete peg that twisted out of the body was an easy pop back in and seal with glue, and the leg reheated and popped back on. I did cut out some of the ball cup inside the leg to make it less tight as well. With Betsy, I think I messed up the repair somehow and made the legs uneven, resulting in the doll having abysmal balance and wanting to pitch forward and faceplant all the time--though I didn't have enough time with her untouched to determine if the issue existed before her leg popped out.

The fractured peg was more of an odyssey. Because the break came from twisting, the ball and peg didn't seem to align perfectly together anymore, and when I found a stable alignment to glue, the ball stuck out of the hip further than the other peg--and the other peg was correctly replaced. Even as the glue had set and I popped the leg back on, the joint still broke again once I tried moving the leg. This happened enough times that I thought I needed to try incorporating a rod between the halves of the peg so they would be more stable. I tried boring a hole in with a needle tool so I could insert a pin, but I could only pierce the plastic so far on either side, and trying to insert a pin and hammering it down further wasn't working. With the black ABS-looking plastic, it was a little easier, because the material is softer and more carveable than the hard, brittle joints Chloe had, but still not the most malleable. I was getting a little frustrated and I really wanted a secure attachment, so I came up with another idea--instead of a deep hole with a thin pin connecting the two, I could do a shallower one with a thick connection. I bored holes in the ball and hip socket, in the process removing the remainder of the original peg so the hip wouldn't be sticking out too far.

Nohell's underwear paint matches her dress.

For the connector, I took the ribbed circular end of a painting nail. I thought the grooves in the side would be ideal for catching and attaching to superglue inside the socket on either side, making a more secure repair. Here's the new peg glued into the ball half.

I also cut the spikes off this hip joint as well as trimming the hip socket because I wanted to make damn sure this leg was mobile. I left the spikes on the right hip.

This piece glued in securely, and the leg popped on after that. It's a little loose on the side-to-side motion now, but it's mobile and doesn't break the hip. Nohell fell once after repair and her leg detached and I was so worried--but the hip joint was intact. She'd just found a weird angle where the leg could pop off, and it was easily snapped back on. It's all good, and she's a functional doll now! I'd much rather have a doll whose leg falls off on the odd occasion than one whose base joint is broken.

With Nohell ready to walk, I was ready to take pictures with her!

She was lurking outside.

Nohell did stop to bask in the decoration on the ironwork outside.

Then she got in by the chimney.

This was created through digital compositing because there was no safe, sane way to suspend Nohell within the dirty flue.

Once inside by the tree, she got entranced by the ornaments.

A mirror ball ornament was a great photo prop--I just had to hide my own reflection!

She also looked at the star...

...and sat among the lights.

She tried popping out of a present.

Then she began spreading holiday chaos.

There was a broken glass angel in the fireplace, so I posed her like she crunched it.

She also played with a human-size Santa hat.

She hid well among the other Santa heads in the kitchen.

This picture is in the exact same genre as my almost-normal Easter tableau with Return Eggzorcist.

It's fun to see how the two holidays shifted the photo aesthetics!

And Nohell rejoiced in some (candy) coal!

Sadie came down to join her. Nohell helped prepare a mug of cocoa.

Then she strangled Sadie with the tree lights.

After that, the two got to torturing other Christmas toys.

Nohell took some good portrait photos against a red velvet backdrop.

She also gave me a good eerie picture on my green chair with a green ribbon around her face as a scarf. I liked her eyes blankly piercing through.

For the cover, I put her in her stocking with some crossed candy canes and trimmed the fireplace grate with lights and ribbons to benefit the photo.

Snow was falling, so I took her out for some night photos. A snowfall I took advantage of earlier this year had taken place in November, but it didn't last a day, and I was worried this one wouldn't last to the next morning either, so I made sure to get what I could. Nohell built a little snowman and gave it her hat:

And the snow was a good portrait backdrop of its own:

And the last photos see her walking in the snowy blackness.

At the end of it all, I'm incredibly charmed by variant Nohell. I wanted a doll that felt like Christmas, and she excels. Her design is chilly and spooky, but also holly-jolly, simple, and refined enough to make her a pretty versatile decoration. I think main Nohell is cute and I could adore her, but her aesthetic tone might be more limiting than the design of her variant. With variant Nohell, I also took the most Christmasy pictures I've ever taken in my life, and I felt like I really captured the magic, wonder, glow, and nostalgia of Christmas through her photos, even though this is a horror doll! Even though this doll objectively gave me huge problems with her leg joints, they actually repaired perfectly for my purposes--though I've had enough experience to push me toward best results this time. I'm wary of pursuing the main Nohell just because her joints would likely have the same issue, but I'd know how to preempt any damage for her and modify her joints to offer easier mobility. And I really do see the charm most of all at the end. This is a doll who has the cheek to drop a human-size LDD-branded stocking on you as a showy surprise gift, and she's a doll who is undeniably festive and compelling. 

What I really needed this year was a heavy dose of Christmas spirit right into my veins to make up for my overwhelming deficiency in the disastrous December of 2023. I think Nohell has done a great deal toward achieving that goal for me all on her own, and I cherish that immensely.