A New Toy Everyday – Under the Scope

That was my mantra growing up — in the days before I even knew what a mantra was. Though even these days I’m not really sure what a mantra is, I remember the phrase each Christmas month because it was also one of the historical slogans of Lego toys.

Yes, I was a Lego child. I played Legos. I played Legos with my own kids. I advocate for Legos to parents of young children. I am a card-carrying member of Legos Nonymous, whose sole function is to fight misinformation and nerd-shaming of Lego players by the evil members of Legos Anonymous. I find that playing with Legos teaches arithmetic, modular math, architecture, construction management, cubist art, problem solving, direction-following, and the social arts of cooperation and sharing. And, when walking parents inadvertently find the occasional unsecured Lego brick with their bare feet, a school-age child can also learn some exclamatory words not otherwise found on their vocabulary lists.

For me, it all began one day in the 60s when my grandpa took me to the Western Auto down the bayou from his house. When I would visit the old house on weekends, he’d occasionally take me to the drug store to choose a comic book or two or five. But on this day — not a holiday, not a birthday — he had something special in mind. Without asking, without salivating, without staring longingly at it, I was gifted a small box of Legos from the toy shelf.

Back then, a small box of Legos may have had 25 bricks, in only dark red or bright white colors, and in only sizes of four, six, or eight studs. (Yes, dear reader, that’s what you call those things.) More so than today’s version, those 60s bricks were made of very hard plastic with strong clutching strength and with edges that were cruelly sharp. My cuticles still bear old scars from those sharp edges, and the old bricks themselves still bear scars of my teeth as I tried to pry them apart one way or another.

And it literally was a new toy every day. With the exchange of a six-stud brick for an eight-stud brick on the snout, and adding an additional four-stud brick to each leg, and after some cuticle bleeds and prematurely loosened baby teeth, you could totally transform your red-and-white dog to a red-and-white horse. Removing the neck bricks and all but the terminal leg bricks from your horse made an armadillo. And removing the head and leg bricks from the armadillo made a square. And that square could become absolutely any animal you could imagine.

But, really, with only 25 bricks, the “new toy every day” concept only lasted for so long. I quickly demonstrated what I think the Lego Corporation knew all along: You can never have enough Legos.

So, thanks to generations of kids like me, Legos has become big business. Really big. Forget distribution by the likes of Western Auto. We now have whole, self-contained Lego Stores in major cities and major malls. A recent visit to the Lego Store at Lakeside Shopping Center in New Orleans starkly revealed the magnitude of this big business. A 1700-piece Legos set specifically designed to build Hogwarts Castle costs $200. A 10,000-piece Eiffel Tower set costs $630. And a 500-piece Millennium Falcon set costs $850. The days of imagining what animal the limbless armadillo square could become are long gone. Essentially, kids are being told what to make, and losing that innate freedom to imagine has become pretty expensive.

And what does such big business eventually bring? How about big crime? Just this past summer, a 71-year-old dude in San Pedro, California, was caught with 3000 boxes of stolen Legos in his garage. In a separate summer sting, police recovered over 4000 stolen sets worth over $200,000 from a second hand store in Eugene, Oregon. Having such stashes were always childhood dream of mine — at least after the pain and swelling subsided in my gums and cuticles.

And big business has other consequences. Historically, most Lego bricks have been manufactured in Denmark. That means massive overseas shipping to U.S. kids. But, regrettably for business, sometimes ships and cargo sink. Not so regrettably for kids, however — especially for those growing up in coastal towns — sometimes Legos do not. Sometimes they wash ashore. An Atlantic storm in 1997 caused 62 shipping containers containing five million Lego bricks to topple from the deck of a cargo ship, and Legos have been washing up on beaches of Spain, France, and England ever since.

Fortunately for the world’s kids, all oceans are connected. Ocean currents turn and twist and dip and rise and circle around according to winds and changing temperatures as the earth spins each day. For this reason (and unbeknownst to anyone except for the generations of tipsy teenage beachgoers I’ve befriended over the years), I have spent the past fifty Christmas Eves standing eagerly and longingly on the beach at Grand Isle combing each wave’s spill for free gifts from the sea gods of the Lego world. Maybe I’ll see you out there this year. I’ll bring the egg nog and raise a little fire to keep it warm.