A Little Nostalgia For the Season

My offering for November's of Between the Pages is about the past--

Recently, I visited Toy Storyland at Disney World in Orlando and was totally amazed at the wave of memories that washed over me. It was like walking into my childhood--which oddly now is considered "antique" in some circles....

Perhaps its walking through the array of toys there are out there with a new grandson seeing and experiencing them for the first time. I'm happy to say that some of the Fisher Price toys did survive the rearing of 4 kids and are now enjoyed by my little grandson, Winston James.

I'm a fifties kid, so I grew up with Paint-by-Number kits, Color-forms, Trolls,

Etch-A-Sketch, Barbie Dolls, and a plastic horses farm that stayed at my grandmother's house. Then there were games --Mystery Date, Life, Parcheesi, Othello, Candy Land, Monopoly, and of course, Chinese Checkers. And let's not forget the books!  Black Beauty and The Boxcar Children were my favorites!

So, I wondered, do others wax nostalgic like me?  I ASKED THE CREW:

What was the toy you loved and cherished until it fell apart? Do you still have any toys/games from your childhood? What game do you still like to play?

FAVORITE CHILDHOOD TOY:
AMANDA --Silly Putty comes to mind. I used to find it fascinating that it could up the ink on the Sunday comics! And Slinky--seeing how many steps I could get it to go down! And my cherished Betsy Wetsy Doll (which I still have)

JACQUI --I know Barbie gets a bad rap, but she and her many pals were my favorites when I was growing up. I remember having two Ken dolls. One with blond hard plastic hair and one with brown soft vinyl threadlike hair...which led to me cutting his hair...and then being very sad when it didn't grow back. A tough lesson learned.

Angi's Play House

ANGI --Oh gosh. I know this will sound really weird, but I loved borrowing my brother's toy cars for the sand box. I didn't bury toys in the sand (like the neighbor kid in Toy Story), but I made tons of sand cities complete with streets for the cars and living rooms for my dolls. The sandbox was added to the front of my playhouse. AND AND AND -- My dad built my daughter a play house that I still have waiting for her children to play in.

AVRIL -- I think it was a doll that was about the same size as me, and I called her Rose Red. I must have been only two or three years old. My naughty older sisters took me into the cupboard where Mum had stashed the Christmas presents and let me play with her well before Christmas morning dawned!

E.E. -- Roller skates. Every Christmas I would get a new pair (having outgrown or destroyed the old ones from use). I'd put them on and go straight outside to skate. I LOVED roller skating. (Mind you, I lived in Florida, so I could skate outside year round!)

LIZBETH -- I, too, loved Barbie, which is still really weird to me because I was a tomboy's tomboy most of the time. But my friends all had Barbie and friends and we played all the time. I literally had the original Barbie doll--she came with a black and white striped bathing suit and mine had a black pony tail (you could choose black, red, or blonde!). I also had Ken, Barbie's sister Skipper and her friend Midge. We got to enact so many real-life situations from marriage to having babies to being astronauts or whatever. We had no idea we were learning so much.

FAVORITE CHILDHOOD BOOK:
AMANDA --I loved Black Beauty and Boxcar Children when I got a little older, old comic books were big since my dad worked for a magazine publisher out of New York for most of his life. But I used to LOVE sitting and leafing through IDEAL books--especially the holiday poems!!

JACQUI --I loved any book with a horse. My favorites were Judy Van Der Veer's "Hold the Rein Free" and a whole bunch of books by Marguerite Henry: "Misty of Chincoteague," "San Domingo, the Medicine Hat Stallion," "Justin Morgan Had a Horse," "King of the Wind" and "Brighty of the Grand Canyon"...oh, wait that one was about a burro, not a horse, but loved it all the same.

ANGI --Hands down the original One Hundred and One Dalmatians or the Great Dog Robbery by Dodie Smith. The 1956 original story was in my school library. I checked it out so many times that the librarian ordered a new copy and gave me the old. I wish I still had that copy but it must have been given to charity.

AVRIL -- The first book I really remember reading is The Children of Primrose Lane by Noel Streatfeild. I have no idea how I got my hands on this book because it was written before I was born. It;s about a group of kids who save the say in WWII England when they take it upon themselves to trail a German spy. I  wanted to pack my bags and go adventuring after reading this book!

E.E. -- That's easy. Black Beauty. I read that book over and over until the pages fell out and we have to tape them back in. Then I started through every library copy until the librarian said I HAD to read something new. I checked out Man O' War (about a race horse). I also read the horse books mentioned by Jacqui, in addition, National Velvet ... did I happen to mention I was (am) horse crazy?

LIZBETH -- Have to join the horse crazies here. I stared with the Billy and Blaze books (oh how I wanted a pony like Blaze!) Then I lived, breathed, played, and read ten times over all the Black Stallion books. Because I was a tomboy, at first I made my friends pretend I was Alec Ramsay. But as I got older Alec turned into my first book boyfriend, with his slim hips, broad shoulders, and natural ability with wild horses! I wanted to run Hopeful Farm with him in the worst way! Marguerite Henry books were right up there, too. It's still on my bucket list to get to Assateague Island and see the Chincoteague ponies!  I passed on my horse craziness to my daughter, too. She owns six horses and became an equine veterinarian!

FAVORITE CHILDHOOD GAME: 
AMANDA --One of the very first games I was taught was Chinese Checkers on a board that my grandfather made and a coffee can filled with the marbles. I collect Chinese Checker boards now I have one sitting out all the time on a game table just waiting to be played. It's one of the first games I taught my kids to play and that I'll teach my grandkids!

JACQUI --My favorite game was (and still is) the board game Clue. I loved trying to figure out whodunnit. We also played Chinese Checkers a lot but it wasn't my favorite because my sister was so good at that game that it made any chance of winning very unlikely. I liked my odds better (still do) in Clue.

ANGI --I have to say that I didn't really have board games. With the play house, bicycles, sand box and a neighborhood full of children...we ALWAYS played outside. We'd turn our bikes upside down, put them in a circle and pretend we were in a spaceship to the moon. Remember that moon race back in the '60s?

AVRIL -- Elastics! I have no idea if anyone these days even knows what it is but it was all the rage when I was a kid. All you needed was a piece of elastic stitched end to end, and (at least) three people - two to stretch out the elastic between them, holding it taut, and one (or more) to jump over it. The elastic starts at ankle length and climbs higher and higher up the bodies of the two people acting as posts as the jumpers progress.

E.E. -- Pretend play based on TV shows. We had a boat in the back yard and played Gilligan's Island. Our back porch became the Starship Enterprise. I argued that a girl could be Mr. Spock if she wanted! We also play-acted Westerns, and I took my brothers "guns" and holster and cowboy outfit because the cowgirl stuff was too sissy!

LIZBETH -- I'll never forget Mystery Date, the goofiest game ever where you got to wind your way around a board and then open a white door to discover your date. Everyone wanted #4, the guy with the white sport coat. I never got him--I always got the sporty guy or the guy with the scruffy beard, which definitely wasn't hot back in the 60's!  The other game we absolutely loved was Mouse Trap--that Rube Goldberg-like build-a-trap game where there was a bathtub, a shoe that kicked a bucket and a silver ball that rolled down a slide and then sent the basket tumbling down to catch the mouse. Played that a million times as a kid!

Send us a picture or a description of your nostalgic toy, book,  or game  and you could win a $25 Gift Card to Cracker Barrel to use in store or online for your holiday season shopping! They have some of the best blasts of the past!!