Each year as Christmas rolls around you start hearing about the “must have” Christmas gift for that year. Best sellers of Christmases past include toys like Tickle Me Elmo, Razor scooters, Pokemon, Furbies, Nintendo Wii, Beanie Babies, X Box 360, Rubik’s Cube and Cabbage Patch dolls. Remember those? This year’s top-sellers are expected to be Zhu Zhu Pets, which are essentially mechanical hamsters, and Mattel’s MindFlex game. Getting one of the season’s most popular toys often becomes a mania bordering on the absurd. It also creates a secondary market for the toys where the elusive, often inexpensive toys can become, well, expensive toys. Zhu Zhu pets cost $8 at Wal-Mart, but can run as high as $60 or more on sites like eBay. Getting these toys also becomes a huge time consumer for parents, grand-parents, aunts and uncles in their single-minded quest which won’t be satisfied until they have one of the coveted toys wrapped and under the tree.
Toys weren’t nearly as complicated or as difficult to find when I was a kid. The most popular toys when I was a kid (back in the dark ages) were toys like the Slinky, Silly Putty and Play-Doh. Like today’s top sellers, many of them have interesting stories behind them.
Back in 1943 a naval engineer was trying to develop springs that could support and stabilize sensitive instruments aboard ships in rough seas. The engineer accidentally knocked one of the springs from a shelf, and watched as it stepped in a series of arcs from the shelf, to a stack of books, to a tabletop, to the floor, where it re-coiled itself and stood upright. He told his wife he thought he could make a toy of it, took out a $500 loan and had 400 Slinky units made by a local machine shop, and in no time the toy became a huge seller. In fact it became so famous that in 1999, the United States Postal Service even issued a Slinky postage stamp.
Silly Putty was also created by accident. Scientists were doing research into potential rubber substitutes for use by the United States in World War II. Rubber was vital for the production of war material and with no artificial substitute, rubber products were rationed in the US. Meanwhile, the government funded research into synthetic rubber compounds to attempt to solve this shortage. One of the many “failures” in this research was Silly Putty, originally called "Nutty Putty," which toy makers recognized would be a hit with kids.
Play-Doh was actually first manufactured as a wallpaper cleaner in the 1930s. When a classroom of children began using the wallpaper cleaner as a modeling compound, someone got the idea to rework the product and market it to schools and the rest, as they say, is history. Before long the non-toxic, mess-free compound became a best-selling Christmas gift and is currently ranked number 4 on the “Toys of the Century” list for the twentieth century.
As Christmas approaches this year, perhaps someone reading this feels like they are an accident or a failure, but as the story of the best-selling Christmas gifts above show us, it could simply be that your highest and best use may not have been discovered yet. One thing I do know – God never makes a mistake, and so you can be confident he created you for something spectacular – something great. So let me encourage you this Christmas to hang in there; to persevere. Who knows, one day you may topple off a shelf right into the history books – just like a Slinky…
Toys weren’t nearly as complicated or as difficult to find when I was a kid. The most popular toys when I was a kid (back in the dark ages) were toys like the Slinky, Silly Putty and Play-Doh. Like today’s top sellers, many of them have interesting stories behind them.
Back in 1943 a naval engineer was trying to develop springs that could support and stabilize sensitive instruments aboard ships in rough seas. The engineer accidentally knocked one of the springs from a shelf, and watched as it stepped in a series of arcs from the shelf, to a stack of books, to a tabletop, to the floor, where it re-coiled itself and stood upright. He told his wife he thought he could make a toy of it, took out a $500 loan and had 400 Slinky units made by a local machine shop, and in no time the toy became a huge seller. In fact it became so famous that in 1999, the United States Postal Service even issued a Slinky postage stamp.
Silly Putty was also created by accident. Scientists were doing research into potential rubber substitutes for use by the United States in World War II. Rubber was vital for the production of war material and with no artificial substitute, rubber products were rationed in the US. Meanwhile, the government funded research into synthetic rubber compounds to attempt to solve this shortage. One of the many “failures” in this research was Silly Putty, originally called "Nutty Putty," which toy makers recognized would be a hit with kids.
Play-Doh was actually first manufactured as a wallpaper cleaner in the 1930s. When a classroom of children began using the wallpaper cleaner as a modeling compound, someone got the idea to rework the product and market it to schools and the rest, as they say, is history. Before long the non-toxic, mess-free compound became a best-selling Christmas gift and is currently ranked number 4 on the “Toys of the Century” list for the twentieth century.
As Christmas approaches this year, perhaps someone reading this feels like they are an accident or a failure, but as the story of the best-selling Christmas gifts above show us, it could simply be that your highest and best use may not have been discovered yet. One thing I do know – God never makes a mistake, and so you can be confident he created you for something spectacular – something great. So let me encourage you this Christmas to hang in there; to persevere. Who knows, one day you may topple off a shelf right into the history books – just like a Slinky…
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