Grandma finds gift from Lawrence granddaughter ‘pretty special’ — and so do 17.5 million people on TikTok

photo by: Contributed

Lola Niccum is pictured with her grandmother, Freda Pickman.

At age 90, Freda Pickman finally received a Christmas gift she never got as a little girl: a much longed-for doll.

The gift came this week courtesy of her 21-year-old granddaughter, Lola Niccum, of Lawrence, who had heard her grandma say that she had always wanted a doll as a kid, but only ever got what a struggling, Depression-era family could afford: a single orange or, maybe in a better year, a pair of plain mittens.

“It’s just the way it was,” said Freda, who was born in 1934. “Life is different now.”

Indeed. One way life is different is that TikTok exists, enabling more than 17.5 million people to watch Freda wipe away tears as she unwrapped her childhood dream at long last.

“That was a surprise,” Freda told the Journal-World of her granddaughter’s gift. “It made me cry.”

Lola got the idea to film the moment as Freda started to unwrap the doll, the last gift in a pile. Lola anticipated that her grandma’s reaction would warm the hearts of her family, all gathered together in Lecompton, but she had no idea when she posted the video on TikTok that it would go viral and warm millions of strangers’ hearts.

photo by: Screenshot

Freda Pickman holds a doll she received from her granddaughter, Lola Niccum, for Christmas in this screenshot taken from a TikTok video that has received millions of views and likes.

She doesn’t even use TikTok much, she said, but her hunch that “some people probably need that moment” proved spot on.

Freda doesn’t care much about TikTok, of course, but she thinks her granddaughter and the gift are “pretty special.” Freda named the doll Mary, for a late beloved sister, but also for “the blessed Virgin Mary,” who, after all, made Christmas possible.

Lola said the doll came from Lawrence’s Antique Mall. She and her mom, Ann Niccum, Freda’s daughter, went there and found a doll that perfectly fit the bill: not a dusty, fragile antique but a new doll that had a “classic” look — “like something she would have gotten” in the 1930s or ’40s, Lola said.

A history major at the University of Kansas, Lola has spent a fair bit of her young life thinking about the past, and especially the past of her grandma, who was born during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, grew up to be a nurse and still lives in the same home that she and her late husband bought in Atchison in 1958.

Freda’s childhood on a farm — carrying water to a home without an indoor bathroom, feeding animals, cooking food and caring for her siblings at age 14 after her mothers’ death — was worlds apart from Lola’s childhood in the 21st century with handheld computers and other luxuries undreamt of in the Great Depression.

When Freda says she walked a mile and a half to school both ways, she doesn’t get rolled eyes from a bored grandkid but sincere questions about what that was like — and that, you can tell, is what she considers the best gift of all.