After going so hard on October this year and feeling a little unsure where my holiday blogging was going, I let myself take it easy this year. I didn't prepare an Advent calendar countdown, but there were some holiday dolls I was interested in, so I thought I'd just throw those in. Like Halloween 2025, my LDD celebration is scaling back a lot, but follow-up was warranted.
My first order of business in this brief revisit was to explore the flipside of the holiday LDD I reviewed last year: Nohell! The doll had two variants, and I chose one last year. What about the other?
Well, Sadie wasn't doing a big DEADvent celebration like last year, but she still wanted to get festive somehow...and she still had some stationery left over from last year's gifts. She thought she'd write to Nohell.
Sadie wasn't sure exactly how to get the letter to Nohell, but she remembered how she had asked for Nohell the year before--she'd left a letter in the drawer of her DEADvent calendar for her imp to pick up and deliver to Satan. She guessed maybe if she re-hung Nohell's stocking and popped the letter in there, it would reach her friend.
This arrival of Nohell was expedient, without a day of response time between letter and doll! Nohell seemed to have come on the very same night, and she was there the morning after Sadie left the letter.
Maybe she hadn't even needed to be asked. Sadie was surprised by how different Nohell looked, but she began cackling with glee all the same.
Here's main Nohell as she actually arrived to me--unsealed and unboxed before she reached me, but complete and still with the elastics holding her hat on for packaging.
Last year, I selected Nohell's variant doll to get me in the festive spirit, enjoying her dark classy vintage-decor theme and moody tone. At the time, I classified the variant's aesthetic tone as "Christmas Eve" and the brighter retro-kitsch main Nohell as "Christmas Day". I've come around more to main Nohell and have embraced a retro kitsch theme to Christmas decor this year, which made me certain I wanted this Nohell for 2025.
Nohell's coffin and packaging are identical across the two variants, save the absence of the human-scale Christmas stocking in the main edition. That awesome "gift for you!" feature was exclusive to the variant doll, though the symbol upon the stocking is only seen on the main variant, so the stocking works for both. I can skip past all of the packaging, since that's covered in the 2024 post. No change between variants.
Here's Nohell out of the coffin.
Here are the two dolls side-by-side. The boots are identical, while the hats and faces are the same save for some color/material changes. The dresses are fully different cuts and fabrics.
While variant Nohell went for vintage chic with a costume of red velvet, main Nohell uses matte stretch knits for a cozier kitschier tone, which start with her hat.
The two hats are sewn into shape in the same way, with the flopped point of the hat not able to be repositioned beyond rotating the whole hat. The fur trim is the same material. The trim is shaped by the elsstic that was pressed around it for ages, but running a cimb through the fur helped fluff it up and make it look nicer.
Main Nohell is a blonde, which I really appreciate. I feel like there are many LDD designs I'd like more with blonde in the place of black hair. Nohell does both across her variants, which I like, and the blonde looks great. The haircut is different, with a side-parted bob that flares out and curves in more. It's very retro.
Nohell's skin is stark white on both dolls, and the face paint template is the same, but the colors are different. Here, the brows are blonde and the eye shading is grey, while the lips are perfect cheery red. The creepy black-void eyes with white snowflakes inside are the same. I initially felt they were more appropriate for the variant doll and felt out-of place for the aesthetic of main Nohell, but I think this looks fine now. I really like the way main Nohell especially turns LDD black, white, and red horror colors into a cheery Christmas palette. The absence of green is by no means inappropriate for Christmas, while it leans more horror at the same time. I think the colors of this Nohell are a bit more cohesive, with the gold hair and bells coordinating nicely and the face colors matching up. Variant Nohell is lovely and chilling, but it can be argued the gold tones feel less harmonious on her and that her use of icy blue is jarring. There's something so special about the red lips, blonde hair, white skin, and black void eyes on the main Nohell.
My main Nohell's eye sockets aren't perfectly filled with the black paint, making the boundaries of the sculpt a little distracting. She also had some black marks on her hairline that needed to be wiped off with nail polish remover, and her forehead got slightly red-stained by her hat. Variant Nohell's bangs protected her.
The dress is super cute. It's a stretch knit top of candy-cane striped material, with a wavy red ribbon trimming the collar, and an attached high-waisted skirt with red velvet trim over solid red and graphics of a skull-and-cross-canes applique logo. The bottom of the skirt is a ruffle trimmed with the same ribbon as the collar.
The logo on the main's dress is also the symbol on the variant's stocking. It's a little odd that the two are separated by the release of these two versions.
The boots, as mentioned, are the same. The bells really jingle the same way, too, which is as delightful as it was on the variant doll.
Since variant Nohell had a stuck hip that broke her joint peg, I wasn't surprised to see this Nohell had a stuck hip too--opposite side. This one had a much kinder problem, though, with the peg twisting out of the vinyl at the base rather than twisting irreparably in two, so it was easy enough to glue the peg back in and do some surgery to make the fit more lenient when her leg was popped back on.
Then I took her to photos. There were some beats I wanted to echo, but overall I wanted to lean more into the bright retro kitsch of this version instead of the refined vintage flavor of the variant. My first order of business was to hide her head in a mass of Santa head ceramics as I did last year.
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| 2024; variant. |
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| 2025; main edition. |
I did another version with full-body Nohell in a newly-acquired Santa jar made of blow-mold plastic.
Then I put her on a striped background to play off her shirt.
I'm honestly surprised the stripes on Nohell didn't take the form of the usual LDD stripy tights; a red and white pair on her (or either Nohell) would seem to be a no-brainer. Maybe she'd have them if she got a Resurrection doll. That would have been fun.
Here's Nohell's coffin wrapped up for the cover. While I didn't make a secret of this being the main variant, I still liked the idea of her being unwrapped just enough to not be totally clear (though if you know the colors of the eye shades between them (or notice the variant's stocking is out of the coffin), it's obvious. A broken ornament complemented her chipboard, but I chose a gold one to suit the main edition's colors.
To tear the paper accurately over her eyes, I first tied her to her tray with a pipe cleaner around her waist and then put putty on the clear lid over the eyes before wrapping so I knew where to tear the paper by feeling the bumps.
Here's a more unwrapped shot.
Here she is reclining in the open coffin.
And another shot with the ornament.
I cut some LDD paper snowflakes for this holiday project, making sulfur shapes on the points. This took a lot of tries, and the holes had to be cheated by using a hole punch for all twelve cutouts after it was unfolded.
Snow had abandoned my area after a good run of over two weeks blanketed in the stuff, so Nohell and somebody else were ordered and arrived with completely imperfect timing. I might get shots of Nohell in snow after publishing this, and add them in after, if we get any more during December, but I might not be willing to unpack her if snow returns in January. A fluffy bath mat is okay for a pseudo-snowy background.
Here are a couple more portraits.
Nohell invited Sadie for a cup of cocoa.
Then Nohell took her to the small tree, offering a new tree topper in place of the gold star.
The next morning, wicked old Agatha brought them tea with Sadie's DEADvent teacup.
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| "There you are, girls. Curse the season!" "You too, Agatha!" "Make it a rotten one!" |
Sadie was glad all of her favorite celebrations had returned after all.
So that's the main-edition Nohell!
There's such a difference between the two editions.
I credit variant Nohell with a great deal of my Christmas spirit last year, which was the recovery from a truly abysmal December 2023. This year, I haven't been "Christmasmaxxing" to the degree I was in 2024, but I've certainly been enjoying myself all the same and I've had a lot of fun with the new Nohell too.
While both have been great conduits of festive energy, I do think the main Nohell ends up being more to my taste aesthetically. I love her cheery retro vibe and her color palette is perfect. Variant Nohell is very pretty but perhaps her blue colors are slightly jarring, and I might have liked her more if her bangs were cut as long as in her promo photo, where they cover her eyebrows. I like LDDs which lean into a meta element of evoking midcentury retro toy design--the LDDs who look like old dolls you could see in the '60s, and main Nohell captures that appeal. It's hard to say which was better quality. I think the bow on variant Nohell ended up lopsided, while her hip joint twisted in two and created a very frustrating repair. Main Nohell is stained by her hat, had weird black spots on her hairline, and her hips also had problems. Neither has very good hair fiber, either through whatever happens to most LDD hair over time or inherent lower quality. Their bobs aren't super tidy. I gather from experience that 2010 was not a particularly shining year for LDD production, so this is likely to be expected.
There are two other Christmas LDD releases I could investigate in the future--the Toy Soldier and one variant of the Krampus doll. I'm admittedly more interested in the latter, but don't hugely adore either. Last year, I was really dithering on the Toy Soldier, but ultimately could never muster the enthusiasm to say "yes". Krampus is interesting but presents a very atypical non-LDD-like presence when masked.
While Nohell and Sadie have become true friends, Satan's little helper can only stay so long. While Sadie protested that Nohell had to go, Nohell just pointed under the big tree. She'd left another doll there with whom Sadie could continue to make miserable this winter season.
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| "I feel like my déjà vu isn't over yet..." "You're a smart one!" |
And Sadie found her penultimate 2024 DEADVent gift nearly repeated.
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