Christmas Winners!

Here are this year’s early winners for best Christmas toys in our household, as chosen by our three-year-old daughter and our five-year-old son. Keep in mind that things change; kids are whimsical and things break.

Our three-year-old daughter has adamantly professed her love for her Princess Dining Set, consisting of a cup, plate, and bowl. This $10 gift has beaten out the $40 doll house, a $25 Finding Nemo Leapster game, and a $35 Hello Kitty Karaoke set. More on the Hello Kitty Karaoke set tomorrow, which will most likely win the Christmas Crappy Toy Award this year.

Our five-year-old son has voted for three consecutive days for his $25 Power Ranger Action Figure set (link unavailable). The Bandai figures are pretty good in terms of flexibility and durability, and this set comes with two small motorcycles and three figures. I’m not sure this one will last the week though, as we’ve been putting together his $50 Mega Block Castle, and his interest in that is climbing as we get more of it finished.

Rising in the rankings though is the surprising $10 Spider-Man Memory Match Up. We opened this one today and two hours later my five-year-old son was still playing with it. The game is a neat twist on the typical memory game: You’ve got 10 Marvel Super Heros that pull apart at the waist, leaving you with two halves for each of them. You then cover these 20 half bodies with 20 cups on a red playing case. From there, the game plays like any standard memory game. The pieces are cute, and super heros are always a huge hit in this age range.

The thing that I like about this game is that the box, which doubles as the playing board, is a sturdy plastic carrying case for the game pieces. Games that include good storage options score bonus points in my world.

There may be potential for creative play with this game as well. After we played the memory game, my son then played with them for another hour, creating such memorable games as “Bumper Car Cups”, in which the superheros rode around in the little cups and tried to knock the other ones out.

The game’s not perfect, though. A couple of the bottom halves are so similar (Spiderman and Spider Girl, for example) as to make it hard for a three-year-old to figure out which goes with which, and it’s a bit tricky to set the game up without catching glimpses of the pieces in the cups, but still, for $10, it’s been a serendipitous winner.

Up next: This Year’s Losers.