The best known of all the Russian souvenirs are the Russian Nesting Dolls or Nesting Dolls. The russian dolls were first created in the late 19th century in Russia by Sergei Maliutin who was inspired by Japanese design. In the Russian language the word for wooden dolls is matryoshka. Every one seems to enjoy Russian nesting dolls. They have become the most popular and best known Russian toy that will become a great collectible item for many years. Nesting dolls are small wooden figures that have a similar egg shape. The dolls design when pulled apart will have a smaller but similar design inside. There will usually be five or more dolls inside, all being smaller than the last. A nesting doll can be designed from anything from particular theme. It can be anything from athletics to folk history.
As 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics Games came to a close. I was watching the beauty of the opening and closing ceremony, I got the idea about how it would be nice to see the many Chinese volunteers be remembered as nesting dolls. The Summer Olympic’s ceremony will be remembered as one of the biggest and best ever. It would be hard to single out only a few of the performers to create the nesting dolls, but the performers I will remember would make a great nesting doll set. The largest doll would be for all of the very talented dancers eloquence. The next should be the drummers for all of their great musical talent. Another one should represent all of the acrobats that seem to make us think that they were able to defy gravity and fly.
If you were going to make a set of nesting dolls for a team sport you can look no further than the highly anticipated men’s basketball redeem team being great representatives of the games. An entire set of dolls could be made for the whole team. With the team having an average height of 6’7’ it would hard to pick which one would be the smaller dolls.
If any one person would be remembered for the 2008 Beijing Olympics it would have to be 8 time gold medal swimmer Michael Phelps. No other athlete won more gold medals at a single Olympics. He also won with class and style. A different nesting doll could represent each of the different gold medal races, each showing the events and times on the back of doll. Another idea could the different designs of the swim suits that he and the swim team wore.
The last group that I would like to see as dolls nesting would be the announcers of the Olympic Games. Good choices would be play by play host like swimming Dan Hicks or track and field host Tom Hammond would make great dolls. Another group would be the studio hosts Cris Collinsworth, Jim Lamply, or Mary Carillo. We would want to remember to make the main studio host Bob Costas the smallest of the nesting dolls. With his 5’7” frame he would easily be the smallest doll.
