Vintage Cherished Teddies Frosty Fun Avon Exclusive Figurine – Carousel Reindeer Not Horse, Glittered Winter Finish, Enesco Group 2005

A reindeer stands where the horse normally goes on this Cherished Teddies carousel figurine. A bear in ice-blue knitting is mounted on the white stag, a silver pole rises through the saddle, and the base has been modelled as a bank of snow.

Priscilla Hillman drew the first Cherished Teddies for Enesco in 1992, and the line ran to thousands of named characters across the decade that followed. By 2005 the ground was shifting under it. Enesco Group lost the Precious Moments licence that same year — the line the company had been built on — and in January 2007 filed for Chapter 11, its assets sold on within weeks to a private equity buyer. Anything dated 2005 therefore comes from the last two years of Enesco as an independent business, with the collectables boom of the nineties well behind it. The Carousel Collection to which it belongs was the larger, multi-part end of the range, and a reindeer rather than a horse marks it as one of the winter subjects, made for a season rather than carried on the standing line.

The base carries two lines that date the piece independently of the copyright year. The licensee is styled Enesco Group, Inc., which the company only became around 2000; earlier bases read Enesco Corporation. The copyright sits with Hillman Family LLC rather than with Priscilla Hillman personally, a change made a few years later again. Both agree with 2005, which is useful on a line reissued as heavily as this one, where the same title and number can turn up on castings years apart.

Avon Exclusive puts it outside the retail trade altogether — it reached households through the Avon catalogue and the representative who carried it, never a shop shelf. The MD beside the trademark is French, standing for marque déposée, and it is present in order to satisfy Canadian bilingual labelling requirements.