Childhood Toys

My dear friend Joan wrote in her blog http://joanoh2.blogspot.com/ about her childhood toys and asked what our childhood toys were. Her childhood sounds so exactly like mine! * We spent hours and hours playing Barbies with the whole neighborhood. My mom also made my sister and I Barbie clothes for Christmas one year. Every girl in the neighborhood would bring their Barbies and accessories to someone's backyard and we'd play all afternoon. When it was time to go home, it took us about ten seconds to sort our stuff and take it all home. * We had the roller skates you put over your shoes and tightened with a key. (Remember the song??) Our very quiet streets had high, high sidewalks with ramps dipping down to accomodate driveway so we had a fun surface to ride on. The neighborhood became our "town" with each house being some part of the town.....store, church, school, etc. * Speaking of which, school and house and church were some of our favorite imaginary games. One year I got a whole box of "school supplies" so we could play..including a little bell! For our games of "church" Mom would less us take a slice of bread and squash it, cut it out in a circle and use it for "hosts" for "communion". We were always nuns with the dishtowels on our heads. * We all had bikes. One year for Christmas my Dad went to the auction they held at the police station every year for all the things the police would find or confiscate and wanted to get rid of. Dad got us each a bike, took it apart and fixed it up, spray-painted it and gave it to us for Christmas. * We lived in such a perfect neighborhood when I was a kid. We lived at the bottom of a hill, so we could ride our bikes down fearlessly during the summer (except the time I tried to do a "pop-a-wheelie" going down the hill and the handle grips came off and I went flying) and we sledded down the hill in the winter. We lived on a dead-end street so we could play endless games of kickball or shoot hoops into the rim my Dad put up. Our house was surrounded by woods, which led us to all kinds of games. It was beside a creek so in winter we could skate. And at the end of our street was a path leading to the schoolyard where we could play ball or hit a tennis ball against the school building. * We also played cards from the time I was very small. In our area, the Merrimack Valley, we played a card game called 45's which is only played in this area. It's a weird game with strange rules...in fact my husband thought I was making it up as I went along when I tried to teach it to him. There are probably dozens of more things I could write about. We spent most of our time outside, summer and winter. We never watched TV during the day, no computer, no videogames, no trips to the mall .....or trips to anywhere really. We kept ourselves amused and had extremely vivid imaginations. Ahhh...the good old days!