toy canon #1: how did you play with toys?
Toy Canon is a project I devised a couple years ago to document all the deep lore about the toys I used to play with when I was a kid. Many of the details about this significant portion of my childhood are already fading, and I don’t have all of these physical objects anymore between moving out of state for college, my parents moving out of my childhood home, and various rounds of donation or packing things into storage. But toys were my biggest "special interest" as a child. Imaginative play occupied a significant portion of my time well past the age that most kids stop playing with them.
I spent hours lying on the carpet developing elaborate family trees, erecting massive towns, roping my siblings with the control of a director assigning roles and loose scripts.
Though the term "canon" originally referred to the measurement or standard for assessing the quality of something (i.e. the literary canon,) it has also been used to reference the "official" version of a narrative. Those who grew up on Fan Fiction know the concept well, I'm sure. If an author's fic follows canon, then the characters, events, and world building must adhere to the original text.
Retrospectively, I want to recover my Toy Canon. The characters and narratives I invented. The physical objects that I used in order to make those tales come to life.
But I'm also curious: how did other people played with their toys? What were the stories you told? Did you have your own elaborate toy canons? Do you remember them well? There are so many posts around about what we played with, the nostalgia for the physical objects, but I want to know the how and why.
So here's to our toys. If you would like to share your toy canon histories with me, please feel free to reach out to me via email.