When I was about seven my brother Michael launched my Evel Knievel down the cellar steps, smashing it to pieces.

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I was gutted. I hated my brother. In an act of vengeance, I drowned his Sooty puppet in the kitchen sink. 'Evil', as I used to call him, was my best Christmas present ever and after the cellar steps Jump of Death, he never worked again.

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Still, the following week, we both got plastic Star Wars light sabers and became best mates again. Childhood might have had its drawbacks: early bedtimes, telling offs, teeth falling out but in retrospect they were all mere distractions to the real vocation of every child, which was to play as many games as possible for as long as possible.

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There's nothing better than remembering an old toy, it takes you back to those magical times when the most responsibility you ever had was brushing your own teeth and when wearing pyjamas looked cool. It reminds us we had a life before our alarm clocks and that being stuck in a traffic jam was just an excuse to invent another game.

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If you were a youngster in the 1960s, it's odds on you would be writing Santa a note asking for a Barbie doll, Etch-a-Sketch or an Action Man.
They were just a few of the must have toys of 1960s Christmases. There was also the Easy Bake plastic oven set (1963), troll dolls (1962), the board game Operation (1965) and Battleships (1967). In 1968, the Lite Brite was the must-have festive toy – it allowed the artist to create a "glowing" picture by placing multicoloured translucent plastic pegs through opaque black paper.

In the 1970s came Nerf ball, the first ball that could be thrown indoors without your parents giving you a rollocking.

There was Uno (1972), an incredibly hard card game with complicated rules and in 1974 Dungeons & Dragons.

The year 1975 saw the birth of mass home video games with Atari Pong, loved by parents and children alike. Parents would wait until the little ones were out of the way to put it on, but the little ones would then sneak downstairs to find out what that strange ponging sound was. At least that's how I remember it.

Believe it or not, in 1976 Connect-4 was the Christmas must-have toy and in 1977, it was Star Wars figures. Speak and Spell came in 1978 and Strawberry Shortcake dolls in 1979. There were five Strawberry Shortcake dolls: two girls, one boy, one baby, and a villain, called Purple Pie Man.

Christmases in the 1980s saw parents scouring high street shops for the Rubik's Cube, Lego, BMX bicycles, My Little Pony, Care Bears and Cabbage Patch Dolls.

In 1986 it was Transformers which topped the festive toy chart and a few years later, in 1989, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

The 1990s saw the launch of the immensely popular Nintendo Gameboy (1991) and Mortal Kombat on the Sega Genesis game system (1993), a sign of things to come.

But that decade's Christmases also had room for the likes of Buzz Lightyear, from the movie Toy Story, Barny the purple dinosaur, Power Rangers, Tickle-Me-Elmo and Pokemon swap cards.

The 2000s has seen more electronic toys in Christmas top 10 lists than any other, with the launch of the PlayStation 2 in2001, Super Nintendo in 2004, Nintendo Wii in 2006 and the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo DS in 2007.

Still, not all children wanted to be sitting in front of a computer screen. Some wanted scooters for Christmas (2000), or Bratz dolls (2002) and a lucky few got RoboSapiens in 2003.

Despite the fact toys have become more technical in recent decades, research commissioned by Lego UK revealed the most wanted toys of all time are dolls for girls and construction sets for boys.

Do you remember these?

Best-sellers aside, Christmas toys came in all shapes and sizes. Who can recall the sheer pleasure derived from Stretch Armstrong, or Rubik's Snake, space hoppers, sticker albums, Mastermind, Downfall, Subbuteo, Risk, Donkey Kong and Spirograph?

Or perhaps your bag was cupcake dolls, Cluedo, Mousetrap, Monopoly, Totopoly, The Game of Life, KIerplunk!, Ludo, Buckeroo, Star Wars Millennium Falcon, Hungry Hippos and He-Man figures.

Each toy opened up a new world of possibility, a new wonderland of the imagination.

There was Test Match, Transformers, Zoids, Snakes and Ladders, plasticine and train sets, not to mention Micronauts, Lego, making Airfix models that ended up covered in Bostik, Airfix toy soldiers, Betta Builda, pogo sticks, toy cranes, cap guns, Fashion Wheel, Guess Who, skateboards, space hoppers, marbles, jacks, Meccano, Scalextric and Hot Wheels to name but a few.