When I think about traditional toys I usually conjure up some vision of grandparents and grandchildren and constructing something either in the yard or in the living room. Sometimes my brain comes up with a big item and other times it’s something little.

Over the Christmas holidays we were able to spend some time with family and I got to witness some of the grandparent/grandchild interaction with traditional toys that I had previously imagined.

At one point, the grandparents went up to the toy room and grabbed a bag of something that my daughter and I had never seen before & they asked her if she’d played with them yet. She eyed the bag carefully and then cautiously said, “I don’t think so.” So Pop takes great joy in dumping the entire package on the floor and proceeding to discuss the finer points of construction using logs.

This is made even more amusing when I point out that they built their house with logs 15 years ago…

At the final grandparent stop on the holiday schedule we encountered tinker toys for the first time ever. Construction had never seemed to come so naturally to someone as I watched her work. She managed to convince Gramps to create a guitar just like the one on the picture & she played it for a while (even adding her own guitar sounds) before destroying it to create something new.

When she got home she told her friends all about the adventures and the building toys came out at home with renewed enthusiasm. Traditional toys s...