From Sindy to the slinky, how well do you remember the toys of Christmas past?

Before touchscreens and robot puppies, we had the slinky and scalextric. Suzanne Harrington takes a nostalgic dive into the toys of Christmas past

Let’s take a trip down memory lane to an era of analogue Christmas mornings.

Toys, toys, toys — it’s that time of year where a fat man in a red outfit gets bombarded with heartfelt begging letters. But when kids ask Santa Claus for this season’s must-haves and Christmas crazes, do they have any idea how much more imagination and fewer HDMI cables were required for the toys under the tree a generation or two ago?

Of course they don’t. They think that we oldies played with hoops and sticks and spinning tops back in our tragic offline childhoods. A time when space age futurism was embodied by the Sony Walkman, when an AAA battery signified hi-spec, and gender lines were not just entrenched, but had pink and blue barbed wire around them.

So, as gen Alpha posts their Santa letters asking for robot puppies and electronic baby dragons, franchised merch and wireless stuff that bleeps, let’s take a trip down memory lane to an era of analogue Christmas mornings. Let’s have a wallow in the warm mud of nostalgia.

Here, in no particular order, are some toy highlights — and for balance, some horrors — from bygone times.

Lego

Lego is among the timeless toys that haven't gone away

Lego hasn’t gone away — it’s become even bigger. 

It’s been heavily rejigged, morphing with movie franchises, so that nowadays it likes to churn out insanely complicated kits where you can build your very own Lego model of the Death Star, or the Titanic. All you need is €1,020 for the Death Star, €670 for the Titanic, a year off work to assemble it, and a doctorate in quantum engineering. (Sigh.) 

Remember when you could get a great big box of Lego with different sized rectangular bricks, a green base, and a few windows and doors? Half an hour later you were free-associating in the realms of Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and Antoni Gaudi. Magic.

Meccano

Chances are you’re too young to remember Meccano, which now regularly turns up in toy museums looking like about as much fun as playing with a haunted toolbox of rusty screwdrivers.

Peaking in the 1930s, it was marketed solely at boys — if you had XY chromosomes, and liked hydraulics, this was for you. Like Yorkie chocolate bars, girls were not invited. 

See also: marbles, dinkies, and geeks.

Tiny Tears

Tiny Tears could drink, cry, and pee

A baby doll marketed at small girls which, when you poured liquid into its O-shaped mouth, immediately leaked it out another O-shaped orifice further south. Its other USP was that its eyes leaked water, and it could make a horrible crying-baby noise. Invented in the 1950s, the purpose of Tiny Tears was to remind female children of their future roles as unpaid nurturers, cleaners, and soothers. 

See also: Betsy Wetsy, trad wives.

Sindy, Barbie, Bratz

Bratz were aimed at less maternal girls.

For the less maternal small girl — because not all female five-year-olds wanted to do mummy roleplay with a leaky humanoid — were the more heavily sexualised options. 

From Barbie of the boomer generation, permanently on tip-toe thanks to her unfeasibly large bosoms and unfeasibly high heels, to gen Z’s Bratz collection which arrived in 2001 — looking like they’d just escaped juvenile detention to form a raunchy girl band — these dress-up dolls were a lot more fun than incontinent plastic babies. 

Only Sindy was slightly more girl-next-door, although her wholesomeness was her undoing — today her popularity lies largely with creepy doll collectors. How we loved them, with the fanatic passion of small girls, creating our plastic fantastic pink Barbie and Sindy worlds, frequently cross-pollinated with My Little Pony and Action Man. 

See also: Spice Girl dolls and Anna and Happytime.

Action Man

Seven year-old John Rider examines a display of Action Man toys in 1966. Picture: Leonard Burt/Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

This model of hyper-masculinity with his swivel eyes, fuzzy buzz cut, and worrying air of PTSD, Action Man delighted ’70s and ’80s small boys, who loved nothing more than battering him, flinging him into outer space, and freaking out when he was co-opted into a Sindy wedding scene, where he would have had to beat up Barbie’s metrosexual Ken. Tragically, Action Man’s militaristic masculinity was his undoing — he was discontinued in 2006, after 40 years of lonely testosterone-fuelled posturing. 

See also: GI Joe and incels.

Space Hoppers, Clackers

Before we began putting crash helmets on toddlers, outdoor play involved a frisson of jeopardy. Space hoppers — giant, orange, unstable — provided untold joy and all-over bruising, as did clackers, which served no purpose other than to create a satisfying clacking noise and the kind of facial injury associated with a billiard ball in the eye socket. Marvellous. 

See also: hula hoops, skipping ropes, jumping elastics, and health and safety killjoys.

Simon

Cutting edge in 1978, the circular memory game succeeded because of its infuriating simplicity — four colours flashing on a primitive console, with the player’s job to remember in which order. Still available today on mainstream sites, rather than as a collector’s item. 

See also: Nintendo Wii (2006–2013) which was frankly rubbish, designed to get kids off the sofa to exercise without getting them out of the house. Pointless.

Spirograph, Etch A Sketch

The simplicity behind Etch A Sketch’s idea means that 65 years after it first went on sale in 1960, kids are still keen — because it’s magic. You draw some little grey lines, give it a shake, and marvel at how the little grey lines disappear.

And repeat. Then once you’d developed better hand eye co-ordination, you moved onto Spirograph (invented by an engineer in 1965 — based on an 1827 idea from another engineer — and still on sale now) where you created elaborate fractal patterns using overlapping plastic circular templates and a thin felt tip pen locked in place. You needed a steady hand, but the results looked like they’d been created by a machine, rather than an eight-year-old. Brilliant for kids who couldn’t draw. 

See also: Uni-Draw, where you could draw girls and ponies again using over-lapping plastic templates, but which never quite turned out like the pictures on the box promised.

Sylvanian Families, My Little Pony

My Little Pony has a strong LGBTQIA aesthetic

The Sylvanians, non-threatening collectable mammals available in a soothing palette of pastel colours, remain popular with children — mostly girls — who may have been intimidated by the whole high heels and gravity-defying bosoms agenda of Barbie. 

Around since 1985, Sylvanians continue to appeal to the sweetly wholesome homemaker child, whereas the My Little Pony stable, available since 1982, has a far stronger LGBTQIA aesthetic, with fabulous rainbow colours, swishy manes and tails, and a keen but niche adult following, the Bronies. Because Friendship is Magic.

Care Bears, Cabbage Patch Dolls

Every generation has their must-have yet pointless collectible craze. At least Care Bears, who originated from an American greeting card in 1981, were straightforwardly cute, if ridiculously overpriced. 

The far uglier Cabbage Patch Dolls, foisted upon us in 1978, heavily exploited their USP — you didn’t buy one, you adopted it. Time magazine speculated that their wild popularity tied in with a common adoption fantasy prevalent in six- to 12-year-olds — that their real parents are royalty/ wizards, etc. 

In the US, the craze led to the Cabbage Patch Doll Riots of 1983 — actual violence in major department stores. 

See also: Kewpie Dolls, Polly Pocket, Beanie Babies, Furbies, and Jelly Cats.

Rubik’s Cube

Rubick's Cube

Deserves its own entry, given its global domination and continued existence. Invented in Hungary in 1974 by Mr Rubik, the world’s most irritating ‘toy’ divided the world into two groups — those smug ones who could do it, and the rest of us who rolled our eyes and declared it boring after we had spent hours of futile twisting and clicking. Still on sale now, because nerds never tire of it.

Operation

In an era of novelty board games, this one allowed small children to practice keyhole surgery, creating all kinds of medical malpractice hilarity.

Remember gingerly removing the patient’s funny bone, broken heart, wishbone, stomach butterflies, and Adam’s apple with a tweezers? Touch the metal sides of the ‘incision’ and the patient’s nose buzzed red, presumably killing him.

What fun. 

See also: Buckaroo, Mousetrap, hand-eye co-ordination, and fine motor skills.

Snakes and Ladders

For fans of more traditional two-dimensional board games, Snakes and Ladders provided — and continues to provide — the perfect balance of dice-rolling jeopardy and basic counting skills to make it inclusive for all. Although quite dull for anyone who could count beyond 10. 

See also: Ludo, Connect Four, and draughts.

Scalextric

A Scalextric race gaming set.

First made when an engineer added an electric motor to a tiny tin car, Scalextric has been equally thrilling and frustrating (mostly male) children since 1956. Squeal as the cars whizz jerkily around the badly clipped-together track; howl in exasperation as your car shoots into orbit when it rounds a curve at speed, or stops dead because the track circuit is wonky. 

See also: train sets, and always needing an adult to help.

Fuzzy Felt, Pegboards

A remnant of more innocent times, when children could entertain themselves for hours by sticking pieces of animal-shaped felt onto a Velcro-like board. Or by fashioning crude stick people, trees, and flowers by shoving coloured plastic pegs into tiny holes on a plastic board. 

See also: plasticine, walkie talkies made of two tin cans joined by a bit of string, and conkers.

Tamagotchi

Tamagotchi was a global craze

A year after its release in Japan in 1996, Tamagotchi — Egg Watch — had become a global craze. Looking after your digital pet meant feeding it, keeping it happy, and training it — via three buttons on the small egg-like console you kept about your person. Keeping your Tamagotchi alive became your raison d’etre. If you let it die, you were never going to get a real life pet. Not even a gerbil.

Pokemon

Pokemon became a collectable trading card series

Another craze originating in Japan began on GameBoy in 1996, featuring a collection of anthropomorphic creatures — Pocket Monsters, or Pokemon — before becoming a collectable trading card series (“Gotta catch ’em all!”).

This became a global Pokemania craze, peaking between 1998 and 2000. Then in 2016, Pokemon Go happened — a collaboration between Pokemon and Google Maps, where players, using augmented reality, could chase down their Pokemons using their phones in what afficionados call ‘raids’. So if you ever see a group of individuals — almost always adults — bunched together in some random urban setting, furiously stabbing at their phone screens, chances are they are Pokemon fans on a raid.

Slime

Slime (1976) was a gelatinous emerald-green goo

Few substances have caused such simultaneous revulsion and delight as the gelatinous emerald-green goo which first became available in 1976, sold in small green plastic rubbish bins. We poured it, we squished it, we rubbed it in each other’s hair. We squealed, we dripped it from our eyeballs. We bought the pink variety, the one that came with worms. Then the glittery stuff, but nothing beat the original green.

In 2018, a Which? report found eight out of 11 slime varieties on sale had unsafe levels of boron that can cause skin irritation or make your limbs fall off or something. Bah humbug.

The Slinky

The Slinky: The most enduring toys of all

And finally, perhaps the most enduring toys of all — the slinky. Not even anthropomorphic with googly eyes or plush fur — just a coil of metal that goes downstairs by itself. Invented by a naval engineer in 1943, it’s still hypnotising children — and adults — today, with its uncanny ability to harness gravity. No batteries required.

See also: Jenga — Swahili for ‘to build’ — which also uses nothing but gravity. What next — the return of the hoop and stick?