by Vernon Crumrine

Created on: December 15, 2010

The stores are full of the latest toys and games.  Television commercials compete with one another for attention and for your hard-earned money.  So what to get the kids for Christmas?  With so many choices available and with advertising and promotions clamoring for our increasingly scarce dollars, what’s the very best gift possible?  You might be surprised…

What Play is Really All About

Well, I believe the usual essentials are all still in place.  I think most young kids still pretty much all want to play.  Nothing much has changed in that respect since I was a kid myself all those years ago.  The idea of doing something fun; of being amused and playing with some type of toy still probably ranks very high on most kid’s to-do list.

I suppose if anything has really changed at all it could be that I may have finally learned which particular toys rank number one as far as most kids are concerned.  A good example?  Not long ago, my four-year old grandson requisitioned an old green plastic bin from our storage shed and then used his ingenuity and imagination to concoct a quite serviceable toy.  He used a paper plate for a steering wheel and then taped on a couple of assorted empty paper-towel tubes for telescopes, or so he says, finally donning a green plastic army helmet that we had picked up years ago from a garage sale.  After putting everything together he climbed in the plastic bin and sat down to play with his very own creation … for literally hours on end.

It was only when his Mom came in to take him home that we discovered just how meaningful and how very valuable his homemade contraption was.  He’s usually about as easy-going as a kid can possibly be for a four-year old boy, but the threat of maybe not being able to take his "new" toy home with him was, at least in his mind, cause for a mini-tantrum and maybe even a rather major crisis for just about everyone within hearing distance.

In Search of the Perfect Toy

We spend a lot of time searching the stores this time of the year for that one perfect toy; the only one that they really want; that simply perfect gift, the only one that will do for our kids and grand kids.  We spend what amounts to maybe too much time plus a lot of money going from store to store, looking and getting and spending.  But as it turns out, something better

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