There used to be a lot of toys like this–toys that got you to use your imagination: and your hands, too. Among the greatest of these was the erector set.
https://leeduigon.com/2016/12/18/memory-lane-my-erector-set/
With these toys, you start with just a bunch of parts that don’t look like anything, and with your hands and your brain, you turn them into something. What could be cooler than that?
All of the kids in my family got their start on my aunts’ erector set that they had when they were kids. I’m happy to say my brother still has ours.
One of my cousins had an erector set, but I was happy as a clam with my Tinker Toys and my Lincoln Logs. I guess I was meant to be an architect rather than an engineer. (Of course, I became neither.) 🙂
Sigh, I wish I had some Lincoln Logs now. The real ones, really made of wood.
Yeah, those wooden Lincoln Logs were great! Nothing like Lincoln Logs for when your dinosaurs, cavemen, and cowboys needed a fort to hole up in.
I think all those toys help a child develop skills and interests in one way or another. I used to build houses and furnish them with large cardboard boxes.
A Christmas song suggestion: O Holy Night
Betcha anything you won’t be the first to ask for that song.
I had both, Lincoln Logs and an Erector Set, something I for which will be ever thankful. Earlier there were Tinker Toys and a Kenner Girder and Panel set.
The Lincoln Logs built an endless series of luxury log cabins which would have done the Cartrights proud. The Girder and Panel was great for refineries. Tinker Toys were probably the most bang for the buck when I was younger, but the Erector Set may well have been what made me the inga-near I am today. 🙂
At one point, I successfully replicated the Twin I Beam front suspension of a mid ‘60s Ford pickup truck, which ain’t so bad, considering I was about 11 years old at the time. I would venture that most of my Erector Set creations were four-wheeled vehicles of some sort, in keeping with the automotive obsession which dominated my interests in my early years.
This was a good thing because I learned that it wasn’t as simple to create a vehicle chassis as it might seem on the surface. By the time I was old enough to own a real automobile, I understood that I was not an automotive engineer and that I probably should not get too crazy with my vehicle modifications.