My favourite toy

Growing as an only child, I was lucky enough to get a lot of presents at birthdays, especially stuffed toys, and I remember being really excited when opening them, and forgetting about (almost) all of them shortly after.

All of us can remember their favourite toy, with which we played endlessly even after it became worn out and, in some cases, beyond repair.

My favourite toy was a stuffed dog my mother had “won” at the local supermarket.

In the old times, you could cut out barcodes from the packaging of consumer products, and when you reached a certain number you could receive a product from free…my grandmother used to have a big plastic bag full of all sort of those “points”, and she would find a specific one when needed in no time: I think that a lot of kitchen props now sitting in my parents’ house, which belonged once to her, come from there.

A special present

I still remember the day when, after I had religiously attached all the points and finally completed the board, we went together to the supermarket to collect the deserved prize: a big stuffed dog, pink and yellow…I had many other stuffed toys, dolls and games to play with at the time, most of them had costed more to buy and looked more appealing to the average child; but for some mysterious reason that stuffed dog became my favourite, and it won a special spot on my bed (until, I confess, I was still living with my parents in my teens).

I called him Bingo, maybe because we kinda “won” it; when he broke, I sewed it up with my own hands, and I remember hugging him every night before falling asleep.

I remember I wasn’t very into saving and recycling when I was little, and that I went through a phase where I would see something nice at some friends’ house and I would go back home asking my parents to buy whatever new toy that was; I don’t come from a rich family, so my parents put an end to that pretty soon, but it took me some years to realise how wasteful I was in those years. But that “phase” was important, because it showed me how quickly we grow tired of the shiny things we see in the shop mirror, as soon as we buy them and bring them home. And this is not something that happens only to children, but it continues into the adult life.

What was mainly a way to emulate your peers when you were little becomes a way to distract our minds from worries, or to fill a void in our existence, or to prove our value to everybody else and show how successful we are in life. But things become meaningless very quickly, and we rush out to buy the next “toy”.

An unforgettable experience

I honestly don’t know why Bingo was so special to me: maybe it was because it was a bit unconventional, more “funny” than “cute”, or because it was the right size and consistency to hug him before falling asleep, or maybe every time I hugged him I uncosciounsly remembered a nice moment I spent with my mother. But I know now that that experience showed me how value is something we attach to things, and doesn’t depend on how much something costs or how well it’s advertised.

What about you? Did you have a favourite toy in your childhood? What did it make it so special?