What better time than Christmas to talk about toys. Playing with toys is considered to be important so children can learn about the world. Different toys help children at different ages develop different skills that they will need when they grow up.
Here’s a list of my favorite toys and games I had most of them while growing up in America. Many of them are still popular today.
Dolls and Homemaking
A doll may or may not look like a little human. The difference between a doll and an action figure is who the figure is marketed towards. I never had an action figure. Traditionally dolls help to teach little girls how to be a good mother. Like many little girls before I loved playing with dolls and had quite a few to show for it.
I desperately wanted a Barbie doll but never got one. I’m not sure if the reason behind that was a financial one or that our parents just didn’t want to give into a fad. Everyone had one, everyone but me that is.
I also remember a doll I had named ‘Chatty Cathy’. All you had to do was pull a string on her back and she would talk. Another doll I had was an infant baby. That clever doll had a head with three faces on it. The baby was wearing a blue plastic hoodie that covered two of them. You could turn the little knob on top of her hooded head and switch her expressions from sleeping to awake and sad. I don’t know why but it never bothered me that the baby had a triangular shaped head with three faces on it. When I think about it today, it’s a bit frightening and sounds like the stuff scary movies are made of.
As for the little girls before me, I remember seeing a Scarlet O’Hara doll in my grandparent’s home. I don’t know if it belonged to my mother or one of her sisters. I’m sure it was a collector doll because it looked like no one had ever played with it. And naturally my sister and I weren’t ever allowed to touch it let alone play with it.
When my husband and I were going through his mother’s things we found some dolls that had belonged to her. The dolls showed their age somewhat after being stored away for so long. I’m not sure they were ever played with or not but I think they were. They had some signs of being loved. But the dolls were very pretty back then, notice the red fingernails, very chic.
Easy-Bake Oven – is a working toy oven that used a pair of ordinary incandescent light bulbs as a heat source. You couldn’t really burn yourself by touching the oven when it was on, but don’t think it didn’t hurt just because it used light bulbs. Those things got pretty hot, think about it, you could bake real food in it. This toy was certainly geared towards girls as future homemakers. I believe Betty Crocker cake mixes were sold along with it.
Creativity
Etch A sketch – is a mechanical drawing toy. It has a thick red plastic frame with two knobs at the bottom. Turning the knobs moved a pen vertical or horizontal which exposed the silver aluminum powder on the back of the screen creating lines. Turning the frame over on its back and shaking it erased your drawing. I can’t imagine how much paper was saved because I had an Etch A sketch.
Lego – Ole Kirk Christiansen started his Lego toy company in Denmark in 1932. Lego means ‘play well’ in Danish [leg godt]. Later he discovered Lego in Latin means ‘to put together’. Now that’s an omen that good things were going to happen for the company. The company had been perfecting the toy for a few years before it caught on in America. By the time Lego became a household word I was too old to find it cool and want to play with it. Quite honestly I have never built anything with the interlocking plastic blocks. The closest I came was when I helped my niece put them away after she was finished playing with them.
Just for fun
YO YO – This toy was rediscovered in 1929. The Yo-Yo can be traced back to ancient Greece. In the Philippines it was a weapon similar to a boomerang for hunting and war until later it became a sporting item and a plaything. The craze started to spread all over the world, and seems to be frequently revived. There are different tricks one can master with the yo yo but I never really got beyond making it go up and down.
Slinky – is a metal spring toy. It was invented by accident. Actually an engineer was developing springs that could stabilize sensitive instruments when it accidently got knocked off a shelf and ‘stepped’ its way over some books and a tabletop and landed in a perfect stack on the floor. There is something extremely satisfying not doing anything but watch a slinky walk down stairs.
Physical games
Twister – is game of physical skill. A spinner dictates which hand or foot should be put on which colored circle. A person is disqualified if he or she falls or supports themselves with an elbow. The last person in the game wins. It was promoted as ‘the game that ties you up in knots’. I loved playing this as a teenager. Although it got off to a somewhat slow start it took off after people saw it in the ‘Tonight Show’.
Nerf balls – when it comes to toys, Nerf balls are a parent’s dream come true. The foam based objects like balls, darts and footballs are soft and are meant to be played with indoors. The marketing slogans promised you can ‘throw it indoors; you can’t damage lamps or break windows. You can’t hurt babies or old people.’ And despite all of that, they’re still fun to play with.
Puzzles
Rubik’s Cube – This is the craze combination puzzle that everyone had in the 80s. That was really a cool toy.
Board Games
Monopoly – The board game is based on an earlier game called The Landlord’s Game and was at first rejected by Parker Bros., as being too complicated to be a success. How wrong they were!
Ben and I have collected many different versions of Monopoly games. Each from different countries we have visited, in the language and reflecting the country places represented on the board.
As Friedrich Schiller once said: A person only plays where they are engulfed in the meaning of the word human, and they are only fully human where they play. [German: Der Mensch spielt nur, wo er in voller Bedeutung des Wortes Mensch ist, und er ist nur da ganz Mensch, wo er spielt.] So I guess that means it’s time to get out the games and toys and start playing.
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