Have you been Christmas shopping for children this year?

I don’t have grandchildren, but several nieces and nephews have little ones, so I like to find something unique for them. This year when I mentioned a doll as a possibility, the grandmother told me that actually, the little girl doesn’t play with dolls. This was a reality check for me. I really am out of touch.

When I was 5 years old, the year was 1942. The United States had been at war for less than a year, but war or the world’s problems did not concern me. I had two little sisters, and at our cozy home on the Chute Road there were dolls waiting for us under the Christmas tree. Whatever else we ever wanted, dolls topped the list. After the arrival of brothers, we started to see toy trucks and building blocks and toy tools piled under the tree.

What was your favorite toy? What did you want more than anything else? I can remember my brothers asking for fishing rods, basketballs and a toolbox. The girls in the family wanted dolls, clothes, a sewing box, paints and pads of drawing paper.

Do you remember the first time you got a box of crayons? According to the Toy Institute of America – my source for the toy information in this column – they were invented in the early 1900s, along with Kewpie dolls, Daisy Air Rifles (1910), Tinker toys, electric trains and the yo-yo (which was originally used in ancient Greece in hunting.)

Teddy bears and paper dolls also were created and very popular beginning in the early 1900s. Magazines like Good Housekeeping and Ladies Home Journal included pages of paper dolls and stories about the characters. Originally, paper dolls were boxed and imported from Europe beginning in the 1820s.

During the 1930s, we got Legos and Monopoly. Scrabble was actually invented about the same time, but called Criss Cross. It didn’t become popular until a couple of decades later when it changed its name to Scrabble and sold more than 5 million games in a couple of years.

The 1940s saw the introduction of Tonka trucks. They were manufactured by the Mound Metalcraft Co., a business then located in a small schoolhouse basement near Lake Minnetonka in Mound, Minn., that specialized in manufacturing garden tools. With a staff of just a half -dozen people, Mound Metalcraft turned out a total of 37,000 metal trucks in two designs in its first year – a steam shovel and a crane. (“tonka” means “great” in Sioux.).

This was also the period when the Slinky went on sale. I remember one of us kids got one of them at Christmas and spent hours playing on the stairs with it, with my mother in the background warning us that we might fall.

The hula hoop was a must-have for many of us. Originating in ancient Egypt, millions of these twirling devices have been sold and are still sold.

One of the most popular toys of all time, Barbie and her friend Ken, introduced themselves in 1959. When I saw the latest Barbie at the store, she didn’t look as though she had aged at all! The first action figure (or doll for boys), GI Joe, made an appearance in 1965 and was the most popular toy that year.

Since 1965 and GI Joe, many toys have come and some have gone.

Spirograph was the most popular toy in 1967. Beanie Babies showed up in 1993 and were to become a collectible. Rubik’s Cube was created in 1974, but not sold in the United States until the 1980s.

Frisbees were originally pie-tin tops made by the Frisbee Pie Co. (1958). Clackers or Klik-Klaks were played on all Spanish beaches during the summer of 1971, and P.O.G.S – the fruit bottle-tops craze – swept most of the world in 1995.

There’s a competition each year for the most popular toy. In the last 20 years, the list has included Hot Wheels cars, Action Man, Mastermind board game, Playmobil Playpeople, Combine Harvester, Legoland Space kits, Star Wars toys, Masters of the Universe, Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Nintendo Game Boy, Power Rangers, Teletubbies, Furby, Cabbage Patch Dolls and Pound Puppies.

Notice that list doesn’t include anything like a new catcher’s mitt, a basketball or any other sports equipment, no sleds, skates, dolls, toy sewing machine or kitchen, trucks, blocks, jump ropes, fishing rods, books, paints or any of the other things familiar to my childhood.

Perhaps you, too, like to remember a time when not every toy required batteries or a television set or some other external device to operate, time when all that was needed was a little imagination. As my late mother used to say, the kids will have more fun with the boxes, anyway.