I can’t remember whether I was eight or nine years old but there is no fuzziness in my memory about the Christmas my sisters and I got an Easy Bake Oven.

 Oh my, we were on top of the world that Christmas Day. We baked our tiny cakes, ate them, baked more and sat down together for tea parties. The oven made me feel grown up and it allowed me to pretend I was a good cook like my mother.

 My daughter got an Easy Bake Oven for Christmas when she was 7 years old. We baked and played and I relived the memories of my childhood. I asked her the other day what was her favorite Christmas toy, hoping she had fallen in love with that oven the way I did. Nope. She loves a stuffed bear that I gave her one year and she still keeps it on her bed.

While the Easy Bake Oven tops the list of my favorite toys, the second was a pair of skates I had begged Santa to bring to our house. It seemed that all the kids in the neighborhood that year got skates and we flowed into the street after unwrapping our gifts. The street in front of our house had a sloping hill so it was perfect for skating and racing. We felt like we were flying.

 P.S. Liking that Easy Bake Oven didn’t mean that I later developed a keen interest in cooking. Let’s put it this way. When it’s time to take a dish to a potluck, I sprinkle on some herbs and spices and put a chicken in my small rotisserie.

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