Happy New Year to all readers of the Persephone Post! And we hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and Chanukah. The bad news was that our broken hearts ached even more (is that an impossibly mixed metaphor?) as January approached and rupture from the EU gets closer; and Trump’s actions fill us all with despair. The good news was that Lydia had her baby (a little boy called Samuel, all well); and we went to the film of Little Women (trailer here) and it is superb. It is actually great art. Anyway, Christmas is for children and toys, a time when the taste police tries to compose its expression as the pink and the plastic reveals itself. So, in honour of the new baby and rather left-field great art (who would ever have anticipated Little Women being that?) and as an antidote to the pink – the Bauhaus designer Alma Buscher. She was the great influence on Paul and Marjorie Abbott and Galt (in the early days) during the 1960s but then her ideals were vanquished by the plastic. But ‘after 1927, she became a full-time wife and mother and never commercially produced any further toys or furniture, although she made furniture for the family home’. Which is probably why most of us had never heard of her until the recent celebrations of Bauhaus 100. This is Small Ship-Building Game, designed in 1923 when Alma Buscher was 24.