What were your favorite childhood toys? Do you still collect them?
ChastMastr
Shipmate
in Heaven
Not necessarily Christmas presents, but what were your favorite childhood toys growing up? Do you still collect them?
Comments
Colouring books.
Jigsaw puzzles.
Dolls with paper clothes. We cut them out, including little tabs to fix them on.
Real dolls. We invented a whole family tree around them, gave them individual voices and did conversations after lights out.
I still collect books and jigsaw puzzles.
I remember spending ages with Spirograph. It was well loved.
Nowadays, I play Jenga even if its all alone on the coffee table. The really large blocks for picnics and weddings are my favourites. I sort of zone out and don't notice anything else.
Teddy bears. I did combine Monopoly with them at a young age and play it with them, poor creatures. I gave them away.
A rocking horse my grandmother brought back from Hong Kong (my uncle worked for Cathay and lived there); the first of my nieces to have a child, if they do, will get it.
Several of those Game & Watch electronic game throughout the years...Donkey Kong, Fire and Balloon Fight.
A train set my dad put together.
I have also kept (and my sister gave me an additional one), Tearie Dearie, she was a small baby doll in cradle that doubled as a bathtub. She also wore the most fabulous sundress red with tiny white spots and her kickers were white with tiny red spots and lace frills on her bottom. I keep my original in a shelf in my display cupboard with a knitted Noddy and Big Ears and some character dolls from the movie of The Magic Pudding (An Australian classic kids story). My Dad had collected all the characters, but did not have Albert (the pudding) and I managed to find one online and complete the set. I wish Dad was here to see it!
Dad used to buy us the English girls weekly comics and I have kept those (they are very ratty and I know husband would like me to toss them), my sister has the Annuals and I will over time get an additional set for myself, well for Cheery daughter really as she used to read them when she went to my parents in the school holidays.
I remember getting a jewellery making kit one Christmas - Mum was always trying to get us into crafts - I kept a couple of brooches I made and had given to my Nanna as Christmas gifts. When she died I asked for them back.
I had a dragster bike and I sold that about 20 years ago for $20, I wish I were selling it now!! I did sell my toy Singer sewing machine, but kept my Casdon washing machine, that used real water, because I used to let our daughter play with it when I was on holidays from work and had time to supervise. She didn't mind me getting rid of the sewing machine, but wanted to keep the washing machine as she remembers it fondly.
Compared to the copious amount of stuff that kids have now, we didn't have heaps, but what we had we enjoyed and looked after.
I would have been very happy to be your childhood friend. I do still collect books but not puzzles.
I am happy to report that they are!
Since you are in Australia...
https://www.amazon.com.au/s?k=paper+dolls&crid=3KH44O0IQW0FT&sprefix=pap,aps,803&ref=nb_sb_noss_2
Nowadays I collect Beswick and Royal Doulton ceramic horses. Long resigned to the fact that I'll never have a "real" one!
I would have loved the Madeline dolls as a child because she was my favourite character in a book ever since I was at Playcentre (preschool).
She was a daring and feisty little girl who wasn't afraid of anything.
"To the tiger in the zoo, Madeline just said, "pooh pooh.
" I still have a copy of the original book, I used to know it off by heart, the fact that it rhymed helped.
Later, I read Miss Happiness and Miss Flower by Rumer Godden from the library, and me and my sister made little rag doll "Japanese" dolls to live in the house.
My dad, who was an iron moulder, used to make toy soldiers.
MMM
@Eigon, I loved Miss Happiness and Miss Flower too and I've only just in the last couple of years, purchased a copy for myself. I was always amazed that the girl could make the doll house with not a lot of assistance from anyone else (maybe I am misremembering the story).
Yes, collected until the year we "downsized" when a grand cull took place. I am still trying to un-collect a good portion of the remainder, and have recently found a forgotten hoard of favourites secreted on a mostly overlooked bookcase.
There were dolls, and a teddy bear, mistreated by my brother, who used him variously as a punchbag and dartboard, The bear was donated to a charity shop during the downsizing, and I do hope he found someone to love him, patched and balding as he was.
Mostly I remember craft kits. Making of "ornamental" models using plaster of paris and rubber moulds and then painting them to give as gifts to family and friends was popular for a few years, and making sprays of 'flowers' with dry twigs and "Glitterwax " (a craft learned at Brownies) was a favourite, especially pre-Christmas, for more stylish
I remember colouring books, paper dolls, Paint by Numbers sets, 'magic' painting books, board games and other similar sit down and stay quiet occupations.
My brother got the roller skates, and bicycle - but also the trips to A&E from falling off or crashing into things.
Our toys were definitely chosen according to gender, and we happily complied with the stereotypes!
A bit of a tangent and probably irrelevant today, but it is interesting how Sundays have evolved, in my lifetime certainly.
@Puzzler my family toys were fairly gendered too - dolls, craft, household items like an iron and a washing machine. Never the much desired miniature Hill hoist clothesline though!
One gift we gave our daughter was a marble-works. It came in two boxes and could be configured in a variety of ways to make a marble track, quite a large one. Kids of all ages loved to play with it and we've kept it as a not to be gotten rid of item, because of it's wide appeal. I don't think it was something I would have been given as a child.
@Barnabas_Aus We had a clockwork train set that we used to set up with our Scalectrix all over the floor. I still haven't forgiven mum for giving it away one year - to a collection for poor children, or orphans or something similar - because she'd decided we'd "grown out of it". Because she didn't ask us, we still had the key that wound up the steam engine hidden in my sister's jewellery box, so the poor kids that got it wouldn't have been able to use it anyway.
It wasn't strictly a toy, more a kitchen appliance, but it worked for 30+ years and I assume the element inside it must have died. I loved my gifts that year and if I could ever get another crepe maker the same I'd replace it tomorrow!
I had one of them, too.
When my daughter was a bit older than I was at the doll's first Christmas, I passed her onto my daughter, who did not look after her and drew on her face with texta. She was kind of not salvaegable as her legs were also broken, so she went to the dustbin.
However, after many years of searching the colourful online shop, I found a replacement. Same brand, same long hair and same phrases. I was so excited, that I found her!
At present she is in my wardrobe, to be passed onto my great niece and I have taken the batteries out so they don't leak and spoil her. I did offer her to my daughter, but she says that she feels so bad about not looking after my original, that she couldn't bear to have the replacement looking at her all the time.
This doll never had a name, but she brought me so many hours of happy playtime and even thinking about her now makes my heart swell!
I'd glimpsed a toy on an inside shelf, and I am now the proud owner of a 12" tall Virgil Tracy, pilot of Thunderbird 2!
I was taking my milk bottles back to the shop - I put them in a wicker wine bottle carrier - and I stood him up in there. When I went into the chemist's, the lady behind the counter recognised him instantly, and remembered the names of all his brothers and which Thunderbird they flew!
My favourite toy when I was very small was a blue plastic cat with green glass eyes. I have absolutely no idea what happened to it, but I daresay my mother quietly binned it when she thought I was too old for it.
Now I have larger and far more accurate 7mm scale ones. (I build most of the wagons myself.)
This is not unlike going from watercolour painting of colouring books with dirt-cheap bushes to working on canvas in oils with expensive sable brushes. It's the same hobby in essence but very different.
Similarly, I used to scrawl simple and naive stories in notebooks almost as soon as I could write. Now I do full-length historical novels on a laptop. I suppose one might argue that a seed grows into a plant.
Much cheaper, but I had a loop-de-loop Hot Wheels track I loved (may have been a birthday gift, rather than Christmas).
Enjoy!
I recall electronic Battleship with fondness...games, usually board games, were a regular feature of my growing up.
My parents (mum particularly, probably given her difficult childhood) saw Christmas (still do) as a time to splurge on loved ones. Gifts well outside ordinary spending were given at Christmas.
I wouldn't ever say that I "collected" my toys. I played with them.
Favorites? Well, there were a couple of stuffed animals that came everywhere with me, that I had since birth. They're still in my parents' house.
We played a lot of board games in my family. Scrabble was one of my favorites. I still enjoy it.
I had the usual array of lego and meccano and airfix models over the years, but nothing that particularly sticks out.
I noticed a couple of nice dollies coming up in an auction lot next week and I might go and check them out at the weekend, if Cheery husband wants to come for a look too there are cars and train stuff too, so should make for a good browse, if not for adding to my collection!
Two memories: the incredibly fiddly clips needed to hold the early track together, and its particular smell (it was rubber; plastic came later).
Mine also had fringing; perhaps we had the same, but mine had no labels.
https://www.ign.com/articles/micronauts-returns-in-new-collaboration-between-hasbro-and-super7
Original ad from the mid-1970s...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20p45xt_ZDw
There's a whole history of the Micronauts going back to the original G.I. Joe, believe it or not...
I found an almost identical doll just after Christmas and Cheery husband bought her for me. She came in box from the US, packed really beautifully and she is identical to my previous one. Looking at her I felt that I was 16 again and not almost 60. I have a lovely cream cushion that my mother in law embroidered for me and because her dress is a brown floral, she looks beautiful sitting on the old chair with an olive green velvet seat and the cream cushion behind her in our spare bedroom. She has brightened my day substantially!
I’m suddenly building a Flower Class corvette.
I keep resisting the urge to buy vintage toys as I do love the look of them, but Cheery husband moans about lack of space in our (not small) house