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.