MIDDLETON, Wis. — Welcome to the North Pole, more or less. If you are between 8 and 12 years old and female, there is a good chance this is where your Christmas will come from. A small, flat town of 17,000. The home of American Girl. If you're a parent, this is where your money goes.

I can't relate: I don't have kids or play with dolls. Until recently I didn't know much about American Girl. Yet I'm spending a day at its headquarters.

I'd been thinking about American Girl. It was founded by Pleasant Rowland, who grew up in Chicago's Beverly neighborhood. The doll company turned 25 this year. And so, I'd walked to American Girl Place on Michigan Avenue to witness the holiday crush. Fathers banged into me, angling to read third-grade handwriting on Christmas lists. A mother shouted: "They come with clothes! They don't come naked!" I heard children cry: "I want those!" and "I want that!" and "The piano! Not the dog!" I learned the piano costs $150, crutches are $30 and Marie-Grace's holiday dress is $35.

I learned the girl of the year doll — or GOTY, as I would later see plastered all over the headquarters — is a big deal, available for only 12 months, each wanting its owner to follow her heart and do good in the world. Nicki volunteers. Kailey protects tide pools. Marisol moved from Chicago to the suburbs but because she could dance, everything worked out. This stuff gets exhausting. I grew dizzy: If it's that hectic here, I thought, then what's the headquarters like? After an hour of staring at American Girl faces — two front teeth poking from their half-smiles — I had begun to wonder what American Girl dolls were thinking.

The next day, at the headquarters, I ask Ellen Brothers, the president, what the dolls are thinking. She says she knows what I mean. When she started in the 1990s, she was taken aback by how everyone at headquarters referred to the dolls as "she" and "her." A collection of historical dolls stands on a shelf high above her desk, appearing ready to either defend her or leap to their deaths. Brothers looks up at them: "They are thinking about the 8-year-old who'll give them a home this Christmas or Hanukkah."

That's what they're thinking?

"That's what they're thinking, yes."

On the assembly line

To reach American Girl headquarters, drive to Madison, then keep going west for about 10 minutes. This part is heartbreaking, because the former American Girl headquarters is still in Madison, a blocky old bank with painted brick that couldn't have aged more nicely. It's exactly where you would like a thoughtful toy-maker to be headquartered. But the company left in 1988, having outgrown the place alarmingly fast. Which is why American Girl is in Middleton, on a 35-acre campus at the back of a dowdy office park, just down the road from the Black Dahlia Tattoo parlor and a janitorial supply company.

It's raining the day I arrive, although it seems like the kind of place where you could find a puddle on a sunny day. The headquarters itself is large, aluminum-looking and featureless, with a picnic table in front. Several hundred people work here — more during holidays — and because the parking lot is full when I arrive, this being the Christmas rush, I imagine doll-on-doll chaos inside. But the offices are eerily silent.

Julie Parks, the director of public relations, meets me in the lobby, which is a ghost town except for a smiling secretary sitting in front of a sign reading "We celebrate girls." And of course, the dolls. All those dolls. Against a back wall, inside glass cubes. There's also an empty case with a note reading: "Girl of the Year 2012." I ask Parks who the GOTY will be and she smiles and says that's announced after Christmas.

I try again. She smiles.

Our tour begins at the library, which, I am surprised to find, is actually a library, with three librarians/researchers eager to describe how they build stories around each doll. Here, they do the groundwork that provides everything from the best name for the doll to the details of the doll's life, which the designers and even the authors of American Girl books then work from. Like a lot of people here, they refer to the construction of a doll as "an immerse, holistic process."

Down the hall, past life-size cutouts of the historical dolls, we are keyed through closed doors to enter the design and development department, which is the one corner of the building on permanent lockdown, where doll heads peek over the tops of cubicle farms. Outside the office of Megan Boswell, the department director, there are bins and tables and swatches of fabric and pieces of dolls. Like most everyone I meet — tours are so infrequent — they seem eager to show everything: There are drawers holding actual day dresses from the 1800s, antique umbrellas, old newspapers. And bins holding every conceivable doll part and accessory: straw hats, cloth hats, flocked hats, socks, sweaters, heads with hair, heads without hair.

"It's so organized," I say.

"Yes, I am close to needing medication," Boswell replies.

I ask what she thinks the dolls are smiling about. She says, "The possibilities," then adds, less lyrically, "Maybe she'd like a snowboard?" In her office, more possibilities, including a poster board covered in magazine clips of young faces. I spot Taylor Swift, Mila Kunis. What kind of dolls do kids ask for?

"Seriously? They ask for everything," she says.

Jennifer Hirsch, whose title is executive editor, is standing nearby and chimes in: "An adopted girl … an adopted girl from Poland … an adopted girl from Lithuania …"

"Pilgrims," Parks says.

"Boy dolls," Boswell says.

"But we just can't be emblematic of all experiences," Hirsch says, frowning.

Eight or nine dolls are always in development, and a list of 30 more possibilities floats around. They won't tell me about these, though in the cubicles of the designers I notice collies, poodle skirts, Volkswagen Beetles, 1950s bathing suits, long California vistas that suggest a ranch or a mountain pass. The need to keep secrets close is so strong that when I ask designer Steve DeSpirito, who molds the heads, the difference between identical molds on his desk, he won't explain. But he does say that heads should not look too animated or too much like a caricature, and that creepy symmetry is a concern: "We have struggled to work back into them some attributes that got smoothed out. You want to say, 'No, cheeks should not be perfect.'"