With today’s toys following the trends of movies and cartoons, last month’s favorite toy can quickly make its way to the bottom of the toy box. It really makes you long for a simpler time when old trains and other wood toys were scattered across the floors, a time when the only sound effects you heard were an adorable “choo-choo” from a wee aspiring conductor.
Just last year, I watched my son as he pushed a red plastic fire truck across the kitchen floor. It was exactly the same as the one I had bought him the year before – only this one still had all four wheels. After going through several toys that couldn’t stand up to my son, I too began to think about the simpler days when a toy outlasted its first “crash” . . . and even the rambunctious ways of several generations.
My grandfather had an old wooden train that sat atop the fireplace of the den. I can still see him sitting there in his old red recliner and faded overalls as he watched me push it along the floor for hours on in. Born in 1915, he would tell me of the times he himself would see how quickly it could fly from atop the back porch in the summer and how it even survived the roughhousing of my nine aunts and uncles. It was amazing to think that it had been through two World Wars and even the Great Depression. It was more than just a toy. It was a history.
As my mind went back to that old farmhouse, I decided to pass the train down to my own son. When I did, it quickly replaced the likes of that old three wheeled fire truck! I could not stop him – he was all over the house, pushing it across the floor for hours on in . . . just as I used to do and my grandpa before me. It was that instant that I knew why Grandpa had watched me with that same old smile each time I took it from the mantle. It was a magical thing that managed to surpass the seventy-year gap between us and somehow make us both kids again.
To this day, my son still asks me every night before bed to “tell the one about grandpa” one more time. That old train has become something that has bonded us together like nothing else I could ever imagine. We sit and share the stories of a man he never got to meet and only knows through a few old photographs . . . and now, stories attached to one wooden train with a squeaky wheel.
If you do not have your own passed down treasure – create one. When it comes to longing for days gone by, online retailers have heeded the call by breathing new life into the heirloom toy, making it easier than ever to start your own cherished tradition. Wood toys make the perfect heirloom and there is just something so special about knowing that someday your children’s children will be pushing those same toys across the floor. When buying heirloom toys you are buying much more than a manufactured item, you are buying memories and a history that will last for generations to come.
