One of the things that I remember about Easter when I was a kid was that Mom and Dad would sometimes put a little toy in our baskets along with the candy and hardboiled eggs. They were often just little inexpensive windup things, the equivalent of a stocking stuffer at Christmas. I don't know what we did with them after Easter.
You can see the 1950s version of little Easter toys in the ad above for Muir's Cut Rate Drugs (a favorite topic on this blog), which ran in the Lorain Journal back on April 7, 1955. Here's a closeup look at one of them – a wind-up bunny.
And here's one, courtesy of eBay, that somehow survived over the years. It's quite nice, actually.
Another toy in the ad is this 'Egg Laying Chick.' (Hmmmm, should that say 'hen'?)
And here's the real thing, also found on eBay. It has most of its hen fruit.
And lastly is this bespectacled bunny bank.
There are a lot of these things still around, in various colors. It was part of a set, with a matching girl bunny. Some of them seem to be missing all or part of their glasses – leaving two holes between the eyes on the boy bunny, and a weird ridge across the nose on the girl bunny (that would not look out of place on one of the alien races found on the newer
Star Trek shows).
