The first Holiday Barbie was released in 1988 and was called the Happy Holidays Barbie. This is what the series was called from 1988 until 1998. Though the Happy Holiday Barbie from 1988 wasn’t technically the first collector Barbie, she is responsible for igniting interest in collector dolls for adults. She started the adult collector Barbie craze of the 90’s as Mattel realized there was a market for these dolls aimed at adults.

Holiday Barbie remains one of the most popular Barbie collections as it’s the series that got most people into Barbie collecting as a hobby. The series has been around since 1988 but it has undergone a name change occasionally. In 1999, the holiday Barbie was called the Millennium Princess Barbie to celebrate the beginning of the new millennium. From 2000 to 2002 the series was called Holiday Celebration Barbie. In 2003 the Holiday Barbie was called the Winter Fantasy Barbie, she was meant to be the first in a new series called Holiday Visions, but it never continued. She and her AA counterpart are the only dolls in that series, but they are still officially Holiday Barbie dolls. From 2004 and onward, they are called the Holiday Barbie collection.

It all started with one single Holiday Barbie. In the first and second year Mattel issues only one doll: a typical blonde caucasian Barbie doll.
The first year Mattel started with two Holiday Dolls: caucasian and fro-american.
The 1997 Holiday Barbie line is an odd exception. There is a blonde, brunette, and AA in the lineup like later on in 2012. So far nothing special, but usually the blonde Barbie is the one, that is widely available. In this year it was the brunette and the blonde was a rare variant.
The Holiday dolls were the 2000 Holiday Celebration Barbie dolls holding the ornament with the year 2000 etched onto them.

2007 was the first year that the Holiday dolls started using ModelMuse bodies.

In diesem Jahr setzte Mattel zum ersten Model Muse Körper in der Holiday Reihe ein. Die Holiday Barbie 2007 wirkt in ihrem roten Kleid und der weißen Plüsch-Umrandung wie eine moderne Antwort auf „Mrs. Santa Claus“. Um den Hals trägt sie das Symbol des Nordsterns. Die Caucasian Version wurde mit dem CEO Face produziert und hat eine blond gelockte Frisur. Die afro-americanische Holiay Barbie hat eine identische Frisru und Mbili Face.

2012 was the first year where the series started adding a brunette doll to the lineup alongside the Caucasian and AA dolls.
2016 was the first year where the brunette version was more obviously an ethnic / Hispanic doll. 2016 also had a redhead in the lineup, which wouldn’t happen again until 2022. The first Asian holiday Barbie was also included that year alongside the other four dolls.
Die Holiday Barbie Reihe umfasste 2017 drei Barbies – Caucasian mit closed Millie Face, Latino mit Mermaid Face und Afroamerican mit LaVinia Face.
In 2021, the brunette did use the Asian Kira face but she was supposed to be a Hispanic / Latina doll.