While holiday season brawls over the hottest toy have become commonplace, cage-match Christmas shopping wasn’t really a thing until the early 1980s. That’s when Cabbage Patch Kids made fighting for the ultimate toy a tradition.

It all started in 1976. A 21-year-old art student from Appalachian Georgia, Xavier Roberts, began quilting “soft sculptures” based on a German technique from the early 1800s. These dolls, originally called Little People Originals, were a hit at arts and crafts shows, leading Roberts to market the $40 dolls to a wider audience.

As the dolls’ popularity grew, Roberts licensed the product to the toy company Coleco in 1982 — and that’s when things got weird. The demand for Cabbage Patch Kids skyrocketed. Early editions of the toy were being “re-adopted” for as much as 100 times the initial “adoption” fee (i.e. cost) — and by the end of 1982, almost 3 million of the dolls had found their way to adoptive parents (i.e. children).

By Black Friday of the following year, things turned violent. Across the country, department store wrestling matches erupted with customers shoving, yelling, and grabbing dolls from one another’s hands.

In one Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania store, a woman’s arm was broken, four other people were injured, and a store manager wielded a baseball bat to protect himself from a 1,000-person, cabbage-patch-crazed mob.

This now legendary incident was caught on camera and can be seen in the trailer for “Billion Dollar Babies,” a 2023 documentary, narrated by actor Neil Patrick Harris, that covers the stunning violence around the dolls.

After the holiday battle to own Cabbage Patch Kids subsided, an entire empire of related toys and accessories were created, and, in his hometown of Cleveland, in Georgia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, Roberts continued running the ultimate road-side oddity — BabyLand General Hospital, where, to this day, visitors watch Cabbage Patch Kids being “born” from fake cabbages.

The action happens under a Magic Crystal Tree every hour when the destination is open, complete with an attending “nurse” in full uniform pulling dolls free. Surrounding this tree are the heads of dolls waiting to be born, each on a bed of cabbage, which resembles dinner entrées more than anything related to actual childbirth. 

Originally housed in a former medical clinic, the hospital moved to a custom-built, 70,000 square foot mansion in 2009, but the birthing is as surreal as ever. Nurses still announce when Mother Cabbage is dilated to 10 leaves apart, and visitors are still invited to offer naming ideas for each doll while it is held in a nursery. Meanwhile, its lucky parents fill out an adoption certificate. They also pay an adoption fee that starts at $275.

Though the birthing is uncanny and the adoption pricey, BabyLand General Hospital is, in fact, quite lovely. A massive, white, plantation-style structure, it has beautifully landscaped grounds where visitors are welcome to roam for free amid outdoor sculptures of Cabbage Patch Kids. Far fancier and more immaculate than most real pediatric hospitals, the building brings to mind a church in its reverence for these cabbage-conceived creations.

In addition to birthing babydolls, nurses also welcome visitors to the palatial kiddy palace, where folks can take self-guided tours. The front room features display cases filled with some of the earliest Little People dating back to 1978. Many of these dolls designed by Roberts were "re-adopted" from private collections with values ranging up to $37,000.

A number of “nurseries” house every iteration of Cabbage Patch Kids, including the 1980s version that made shoppers go wild, plus hand-stitched Cabbage Patch Kids created by local artists; Cabbage Patch Cuties, smaller dolls in animal costumes; and Furskin Bears, a latter-day offshoot. 

While the threat of sensory overload is real with every possible surface covered in dolls and toys, for many this is nostalgic nirvana.

Of the site’s visitors on the day I went, a substantial number were over-30 women who seemed just as eager to watch a baby be plucked from a fabric cabbage as any four-year-old. Considering a $40 doll was out of reach for many families in the early ‘80s, some of these visitors probably never received one of these coveted creations back then. Perhaps they visit the hospital as adults to indulge that unfulfilled childhood fantasy — and why the heck not?

Now a few years short of their 50^th anniversary, the Cabbage Patch Kids’ legacy doesn’t show any sign of slowing. From becoming the most successful new doll in history to traveling to outer space (Cabbage Patch Kid Christopher Xavier rode on a U.S. space shuttle in 1985) to having a postage stamp issued in their honor in 2000, the Cabbage Patch Kids’ saga continues to unfold.

BabyLand General Hospital is located in the North Georgia mountains near the faux Bavarian village of Helen — an attraction in itself. Admission is free, and the hospital is open daily to the public.