Slinky

The classic coiled-spring toy! Stretches, coils, and can even walk down stairs.

It stretches, coils, tumbles from hand to hand and (with a little cooperation and the right staircase) will even walk itself down a flight of stairs.

If you've had a few Slinkys over the years, you probably got good at spotting one before you even unwrap the gift - that small, almost square wrapped box had a distinctive size, shape, weight and feel. You just knew it was going to be a Slinky.

Getting a Slinky to walk down stairs was another matter. The commercials made it look easy, but I found that narrow wooden stairs worked much better than wide carpeted ones because a Slinky takes surprisingly short steps. My brother tried to get one to walk down an escalator, but the steps were too wide.

Another important rule of Slinky ownership: don't see how far you can stretch one. We did - it kinked. And once it gets a serious kink in it, it's never going to work quite the same way again.

The Slinky's back story is almost as good as the toy. Engineer Richard James got the idea for the Slinky after watching a spring tumble rather than simply fall. But convincing stores that a coiled piece of wire was a good toy for children proved difficult at first. All of that changed during the 1945 Christmas season, when a demonstration at Gimbels department store in Philadelphia sold 400 Slinkys in about 90 minutes.

The original metal version is still the classic, but it isn't the only choice. Slinky also comes in plastic, colorful, oversized and smaller versions. But it's hard to improve on the original, classic Slinky.