Keeping around your favorite childhood toy: acceptable or silly?

I still have my stuffed penguin from when I was 4 years old

All my cuddly toys are in an old laundry basket somewhere in my parents' spare room.

I am a 39y.o. comic book collector. So.

After having them around the house on display, I reached a point where all my childhood toys got packed up and put in a big pink pig toybox, wrapped in a few garbagebags and put under my mom's house. Regrets on this decision are rare but oddly painful.

(I never had many - no more than a laundrybasketfull)

I've got a few childhood toys, but they are all in boxes. A stuffed dog is completely something that you could put on your bookshelf or dresser and people wouldn't bat an eye at it. You're clear, Abbott.

I think it's also important to keep a few childhood toys so that you can show your kids what you played with when you were their age. My parents kept a bunch of their stuff from the 40s and 50s. It helped me bond with them and gave me a sense of history, sorf of.

I didn't bond with toys as much as books. God, I'd love to have the copy of "The 13 Clocks" I read as a kid.

Found this looking for a pic of that pink pig toybox: http://www.jeffpidgeon.com/labels/toy%20OTD.html

It had a bunch of notations by my dad in pencil in the margins. Later on I marked up a bunch of Tintin albums, adding 'pow!' and 'wham!' type sound effects in appropriate frames. I miss those, too.

Gave my bear to my daughter. He sits in teh closet with the other 4000 stuffed animals that she never plays with.

ah, here it is: http://www.pimtoysdelivery.com/shop/p/pimtoysdelivery/img-lib/spd_20061114145134_b.jpg

You are totally in the clear, if you ask me. There are some objects that can't really be thrown out because they have memories so inextricably linked to them that throwing out the item is taking a serious risk on throwing out the memory.

At least for me.

John's mom gave me his favorite childhood stuffed animal – an octopus named Wilbur. I showed it to him, "Look, John, your mom gave me Wilbur!" And he snatched it from me and said, "She can't give that to you! It's mine!"

So we've got Wilbur and JoJo (and a Guadalupe & borg action figure) protecting our cable tv box & record collection.

Oily, I think there is a big diff in being 39-yr-old comics collector & 39-year-old Toyfare magazine items collector.

Me and my lad both made sure our fave childhood bears were one of the first things we took to the new place when we just moved. Its not like we keep them reverently on a shelf, they usually just loll around next to the bed, but we each have an older-than-ourselves stern little bear, and they're like talismans. I'd be very distressed if I lost Ted.