Not your amateurish gag boxes, but 4-color genuine-looking boxes like you find at all your Big-Box stores, with graphics, marketing copy, testimonials and instructions. You pick the Crib Dribbler infant feeding system, just like rabbit waterers or the time saving Bathe & Brew so you can take care of the morning shower and coffee at the same time. Boxes are all 11-1/4" x 9" x 3-1/4" and are, naturally, empty. You see, the real gift goes inside. 

Very Mad Men-ish, these fuzzy stick-on mustaches, with models on the package so you can see exactly how you'd have looked in 1963. You get (7) 'staches, including the Hollywood, Hero, Bruiser and Weasel in black, the Square and Sheriff in brown, and the gray, handlebar Grampa. Great disguises. Great costumes.

Half of the best stuff in the world comes in a can; the other half comes on a stick. (It’s true, don’t argue with us.) Now you get to pick from two kinds of canned fun, both in 5-5/8” x 4” x 2-1/4” deep cans with hinged tops. You pick. The Pranks in a Tin has straw finger traps, a whoopee cushion, nose & mustache glasses, a joy buzzer, the nail-through-finger trick with a bloody bandage, and a squirting ring. Go make a pre-adolescent happy. The Classic Games tin holds a standard deck of playing cards, rubber ball and (10) metal jacks, tiddlywinks with a small felt pad, (30) pick-up sticks, and (5) shooters plus (30) smaller glass marbles, and not an electronic game in the bunch.

Go fly a kite. We highly recommend this rainbow-colored nylon parafoil version, measures 20" x 23" at its widest with a 14-foot tail (over three times longer than a tiger's) on a spindle with a couple hundred feet of string. Includes a carrying pouch, too, making it a very practical, portable parafoil.

Introducing the Aeromax 2000. This update of the classic parachute toy has mesh under the canopy instead of lines, so it's tangle-free. Big 20" chute floats the little 3-1/2" tall trooper gently to the ground. In assorted colors, which we'll pick because we have really good color sense.

It's nice to know that some things don't change. One is the Jacob's Ladder. Still made with (6) slabs of wood, each about 2" x 2" x 1/2", each a bright combination of colors, and all connected by a contrasting ribbon. Hold one end up and let the string of slabs dangle. When you flop the top block end for end, each lower slab in turn will flop end for end. Fascinating. Particularly if you are about 5 to 9 years old.

Very much a classic magic trick set, but in a little 5-1/2” x 4” x 2-1/4” tin. Hardly seems possible, but it contains more than (25) tricks, including vase and ball, mystery computer, floating hearts, balls and cup, disappearing coin, nail box and a buncha card tricks. Includes a 32-page instruction booklet, too.

This whimsical pack of (30) postcards measures, unsurprisingly, post-card size 5-3/4" x 3-15/16", with non-duplicating images of gravy and bacon, Nikola Tesla, narwhals, spontaneous human combustion, boxing kangaroos, infinity and taxidermy, among many others of that ilk. Those ilks. Whatever--just buy 'em and stop asking so many questions. Blurbs on the back.

If you're devoted to explosions, and who isn't, you'll love the new expanded 2nd edition of William Gurstelle's Backyard Ballistics, now 25% longer, with 25% more ka-boomery. Still the go-to reference work for building rockets, cannons (carbide and potato), flingers, fire kites, electromagnetic pipe guns, tennis ball mortars, cleaner-bag balloons, ballistic pendula and petards. You simply can't have more fun with common household materials. The soft-cover, 210pp compendium includes detailed and illustrated instructions, parts lists and sensible ways not to be hoist on your own petard. Be careful out there.

We're fresh out of weasels, and since you're a fan of foam ball poppers in general you probably already have our cow popper. Now try this unicorn popper! Stands 6-1/2" tall (it's a giant among lesser unicorns) and comes with (6) rainbow-colored foam balls, which is all they use in unicorn land.

You've seen everybody's favorite desk toy. The one that makes you swear you can pick up the coin that's right inside it. Too bad it's really a hologram you're looking at! Now you can own this petite version of the popular "illusion" toy. This one, 6" dia x 2" tall, with a 1-5/8" opening on the top, leaves more money in your wallet and more room on your desktop. And try to touch that little rubber frog that comes with it. It's either enchanting - or enchanted!

Definitely not that other big green monster that ate the Pacific rim because he's been trademarked. This is just a 6" tall molded plastic green monster that happens to look just like him. (If coincidences didn't happen, there wouldn't be a name for them.) Oddzilla has movable arms, legs and tail.

Our each is a dozen glass gems, in a round cut in (12) different colors, including pink, green, blue, red, golden, white, and various shades of each. Think diamond, ruby, sapphire, emerald, amethyst, topaz, whatever. In a dark blue book-like presentation box, the Liz Taylor collection features (12) gems at 40mm across (1.57” or tad bigger than a silver dollar) by 27mm (1.06”) deep.

We don't know the folks at TSA, but we're hoping they won't let you on the plane with this remote-controlled rattler, for everyone's sake. Measures approx 16" long with (22) segments and creeps along quite quickly when you push the forward, left or right buttons on the snake-eggish infrared remote. Remote runs on (3) button-cell batteries, included, and the snake is rechargeable via the included USB charge cord. (If you're USB-deviceless, get our 40579 USB-out wall plug.) Range is about 20 feet. We'll pick a snake in serpauthentic speckled gray, speckeld white, or green or orange, all with a nice retractable tongue.

Hold the bottom onion-shaped bulb of this 4" glass toy in your hand and watch the liquid (green, red, blue or purple, we'll pick) magically bubble up into the top chamber and keep on bubbling like the dickens, as your grandmother used to say. The magic is ethyl alcohol and physics. WARNING! The glass if fragile and the liquid is nasty. If you drop the thing in the kitchen it will eat the finish off the tile and permanently stain the floor, so don't let the kids handle this item unsupervised.

It’s called Thinking Putty® because while you do whatever you want with it, your brain relaxes and opens up to all kinds of creative thinking. Need it? Yes. And you can also knead it. Or bounce it, bend it, tear it, stretch it, snap it, pop it. Pick from the 3.2 oz of dark green magnetic Strange Attractor putty with iron filings infused in it, plus a 1/2” cubed rare earth magnet; the 3.2 oz glimmering light green Foxfire putty that you can draw on with the included blacklight keychain light; or the Super Scarab, 3.2 oz. of color-shifting blue/purple/copper/red putty reminesent of Egyptian scarabs. Comes in a 4” dia x 1-3/8” tin.

Why, when we were your age all we had to play with was a stick and an old tin can. But never mind that--now you too can make your own fun in the form of actual wind-up toys with this small wind-up motor with an attached pair of 9/16” dia wheels on a 1-1/8” wheelbase. The winding shaft is 1-1/8” long and the whole shebang measures 1-1/4" x 5/8" x 1/2" and has a good long running time of approx 10 seconds.

Glow-in-the-dark plastic skeleton, about 1 ft. tall. That is the end result. What you get is a box of bones that you snap together to create the final product. Which is kind of fun. Or of course you can leave some or all of them disassembled to create a sense of havoc. We're not going to claim it is anatomically correct, or educational. But you do need to figure out that feet don't grow from shoulders and thigh bones do not connect to jaw bones. Maybe 5 minutes of fun!! And the finished product is one of our better little Halloween guys.