Toy Story

Well, look at that. A small boy playing with what might be considered by an old-fashioned and irredeemably sexist parent as girl's toys. Boys and girls are all one now and it's our job as parents to make this plain. The picture is just one page in the new toy catalogue from Toy Planet (see it here) as approved by Spain's loveys and the Ideal newspaper here, the other pages are similar: girls with footballs, boys with frilly dolls. The company pitches itself as a purveyor of 'non-sexist' toys (or perhaps reverse-sexist) and it should do well. Besides the anodyne toys now favoured by Spanish parents (especially those who evidently don't want grand-children), there is also a popular drive these days to destroy aggressive war toys. These ghastly things, plastic machine guns (pink for a boy) and so on are routinely handed in after Twelfth Night and burnt in a municipal bonfire or, as in the picture below, mercilessly and overwhelmingly crushed:

So remember, a feather duster for the boys and an electric train set for the girls. Who knows - maybe a few of the braver kids will swap their gifts once the light are out...