Childhood wooden toys...

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by: Hannah Nixon
Total views: 44
Word Count: 311
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2011 Time: 8:21 AM
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Thinking about wooden toys takes me back. When I was a child, my set of wooden blocks were featured in nearly all my play activities. I was a GI Joe and Transformers fanatic, so I would use these blocks to build large sets where my action figures could interact. What was so great was that there were so many blocks of different shapes and sizes that I could build a close replica of many different sets.

One day I could fashion a train station; the next, a castle. The wooden block environments were very flexible and allowed for a lot of creativity. My creativity was already constrained by including the action figures, which seriously limited the possibilities to rough simulacrums of action movies, but the blocks allowed me to exercise some creative impulse by building. Also, the environments were highly mutable, so in the (likely) event of a firefight, I could topple certain features and reflect the damage the environment sustained. Writing this has made me nostalgic for my play sessions as a child.

I still have my blocks, but I would feel silly playing with them now. I would like to play with them with my nieces, and perhaps one day with my own children. I am glad I saved these blocks, for they aren't very popular these days. I've been to toy stores recently while shopping for my niece's birthdays, and it is all plastic figures and Lego blocks. Legos are probably more expressive than wooden blocks since you can attach them to one another, but they are astronomically expensive. To build a set of similar size as the ones I build with my blocks out of Legos would cost a fortune. Plus wood feels nicer to the touch than Legos. The wood wears down with age and you can feel all of their history in their finely-worn grooves.

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