Seasonal Shopping from Yesteryear

As I struggle to come up with ideas for Christmas presents for my great nieces, (to be fair, it is the younger one I'm having trouble with, the older one is just fine with Batman graphic novels and Stephen King), I sometimes that I could go back in time, when stuff for kids seemed much simpler.  That said, I think that they are both too old for the cowboys outfits and water guns featured in this ad from the January 1952 Meccano Magazine.  Mind you, these days you'd never get away with selling kids water pistols that are replicas of actual guns - nowadays they all have to be futuristic looking and moulded in day glo colours so as not to be mistaken for the real thing.  Personally speaking, I would have loved to have had a Tommy Gun replica that sprayed water when I was a kid.  (Actually, when I was a kid, I recall that Airfix marketed replicas of a Tommy Gun and an L1A1 Self Loading rifle, that fired plastic replica bullets, as toy guns.  They were pretty realistic looking, being only slightly under scale).

The rubber band powered aircraft model was also still popular when I was a kid, although, as the ad indicates, its heyday was probably in the fifties, when you could get replicas of all manner actual prototype fighter planes.  They were the first step toward the more sophisticated model planes that were powered by small petrol engines and flown by cables, which became increasingly popular as the fifties went on.  These, in turn, were the forerunners of the radio controlled models still available today.  The Leeds Model Co. ad is interesting, as it highlights the fact that, immediately post war, the UK's industries had to focus on exports in order to generate foreign exchange reserves, another reason why austerity and rationing continued at home in the UK for many years after the end of the war.  Mind you, the model railway equipment produced by Leeds Model Co. was at the top end of the price range, being high quality and hand built, meaning that average Britons were unlikely to have noticed their absence from the shelves.

Ah, well, back to trying to figure out what my twelve year old great niece wants for Christmas - the trouble is that, like most kids of her age, she seems to be into something different every week.  I just can't keep up.