It’s fun to shop for presents—but it can also be exhausting. So why shop the stores (or spend hours online) when you can consult our guide to the best presents ever? Kids are bound to love these gifts because we filled our list with winners.
For Kids Who Love Make-Believe
- Fire hats, police badges, character costumes, and dress-up clothes
- A child-size kitchen set with plastic food to “cook and serve”
- Pretend home-repair and housekeeping items, such as plastic tools, pots and pans, utensils, and cardboard or plastic grocery-store favorites
- A dollhouse, complete with furniture and rooms to decorate
- A pretend tea set for entertaining
- Farm- and zoo-animal play sets with richly detailed features to encourage learning about nature
- Plastic dinosaurs (because it’s just so super cool to have a dinosaur collection)
- Awesome new collectibles, including anime figures, superheroes, shiny coins, rocks and minerals, palm-size trains, tiny planes, and mini cars with moveable parts, character dolls, baseballs, hockey pucks, and, of course, any or all accessories
- Tabletop puzzles
- Giant floor puzzles
- Puzzle books
- Beads to string
- Interlocking blocks for building
- Wood shapes to stack and sort
- A sand table, buckets, and strainers
- A water table and cups
- Kid-size binoculars, a telescope, or a microscope set
- Made-for-little-ones gardening tools, a watering can, and seeds
- Pail-and-shovel combos
- A wheelbarrow
- A tunnel to crawl through
- A wagon
- A swing set
- A slide
- A tire swing
- A mini basketball hoop and ball
- A balance beam
- Kid-size golf clubs and balls
- A monkey bar
- A climbing wall
- A jungle gym
- Fitness hoops
- Sports gear for youth T-ball, basketball, lacrosse, or soccer
- Modeling clay
- A guitar
- A keyboard
- A xylophone
- Maracas
- A harmonica
- An accordion
- Tambourines
- Jazz, tap, gymnastic, or ballet shoes
- Books. Books. And more books
- A digital watch
- An analog watch
- An awesome backpack
- One odd-looking but totally huggable giant stuffed animal
- Just-perfect-for-bedtime small stuffed animals; fabric and lifelike dolls; and age-appropriate miniature figures to take care of and carry around