Do you remember tearing down the stairs at five in the morning, in wide-eyed anticipation of the mountain of wrapped boxes under the Woolies’ fireproof silver tinsel tree?  Do you remember the sense of disappointment when what you’d asked for wasn’t among them?  Or worse, when you’d been bought a cheap, knock-off version of a toy you really wanted? 

Back in 2004, TV Cream celebrated the Top 100 Toys that turned up in the stockings of yesteryear, from the tiniest 50p rubber novelty to the many bulky Bakelite candidates for hallowed “main present” status.  The list proved so popular that we decided to experiment with an all-new, expanded electronic blog version in 2006, which itself became a book in time for Christmas 2007. But we don’t want it to end there!

Is your favourite toy missing?  Tell us why it should be here.  (Why in Hasbro’s name is Mr Potato Head still not listed, say?)  Have you got photos of the ones you did own?  We’d love to see them.  If you’ve found a definitive web site dedicated to a single toy, or you have some recommended reading for us, let us know.  From Big Trak to Buckaroo, Mastermind to Merlin, Sorry! to Strawberry Shortcake, we want to take each desirable toy from the ‘60s through to the ‘90s and examine and catalogue it (in the Grattan’s, rather than the scientific, sense) by the very people who owned them. 

So pile in and tell us what you think.  There’s only one rule: be evocative.  We’re not compiling a dry, definitive history of the toy industry or a stat-packed collector’s price guide here.  We just want to find out which were the best toys and why.  And we hope to make it fun to read.  If all goes to plan, we’ll publish a sequel to the first book in time for next Christmas, and your comments could be in it. 

As well as going all super-user-contribution-driven and blog-technology Creative Commons content managed, we’ve added some new features.  Each listing now has active eBay links in case you fancy tracking down a favourite toy and reliving a particularly disappointing childhood birthday.  If you’ve bought a much-coveted vintage toy recently, please write to us and tell us what you thought of it.  Plus you can do whizzy stuff like sign up to the XML feed for regular updates.  Whatever that means. 

(If you want to keep up with all the boring stuff that’s going on behind the scenes, or you’d like to help improve the site - Gawd knows we need it - there’s a proper blog about all that, too!)

Ages 8-adult, for two to six players; the TV Cream Toy Catalogue.   Let the flurry of Mr Men wrapping paper commence!