Back when I had four small children, quantity was always prized over quality when it came to gifts.
On Christmas morning, my son and three step-daughters liked to dive into a pile of presents, all featuring colour-coded wrapping, so everyone knew which heap of glittering promise was theirs. They also woke up to stockings stretched wider than a weightlifter’s bicep, crammed with sweets, toys and little games.
As Santa’s deputy in Manchester, I was responsible for gift-buying – and with a large mortgage and four separate flying sleighs to fill, if I could get a bargain, I would.
Charity shops, pop-up bargain stores, websites that promised speedy delivery of minuscule pocket games that cost 10p to make… I deployed ’em all. The kids were delighted, and nobody died.
But it now seems I was lucky in managing to steer them through the festive season intact, as according to a new investigation by Which?, it’s “frighteningly easy” to buy toys described as “potentially fatal” online.
Over half of 23 toys they tested from sites such as Wish, eBay, Amazon, TikTok and AliExpress posed “serious risk” to children, with sharp points, super-strong magnets that could rip a child’s stomach if swallowed and a raft of choking hazards.
Almost all of the toys were missing safety marks, and over 91 per cent couldn’t be legally sold here. I admit that even I, with my haphazard and bargain-tastic approach to kitemarks, was pulled up short by this.
Snapping up a few charity shop books that some other child might have licked, or investing £5 in a shonky Tamagotchi for a seven-year-old didn’t seem so bad.
But I like to think I wouldn’t have been buying fluffy pigs with rattly loose eyes, or plastic baby toys that (according to the testers) smashed to pieces under mild pressure. Escaping batteries, long cords to choke on, sharp-edged chew toys… it’s like a horrifying roster of Toy Story’s hybrid, gothic playthings, the doomed toys welded together by evil next-door neighbour Sid, as well-made, kite-marked Woody and Buzz Lightyear look on in horror. Or worse, a return to the toys (lead soldiers!) made long before health and safety was a twinkle in a portly factory owner’s eye.
When my grandma was a child in the 1920s, a family friend gave her a wonderful celluloid wax doll. She adored it for two hours until her father came home and threw it on the fire, where it went up like a rocket. “That could have been you,” he told her. Harsh but ultimately, good parenting.
The Which? findings are equally alarming. I might not buy a child’s gift from Wish (mainly because they largely seem to sell jumpers with four head-holes and fur-covered knee braces) but I wouldn’t think twice about buying from Amazon, vaguely imagining that such a huge site would employ some form of quality control.
But of course, third-party sellers based abroad can work around that – and on eBay, anyone can sell anything, so long as it’s not alive. (That was a lucky excuse the year my son requested a king snake).
The best advice is, if you want a bargain, buy it in the sales from a reputable store – don’t rely on manufacturers to put your child’s safety ahead of profits.
I got lucky; Christmas was fun, everyone was fine. But that was a while ago, before the global internet meant you could have anything shipped from anywhere for the price of a chocolate orange.
Maybe stick to buying a few of those for the children in your life this Christmas – they’re designed to be smashed under mild pressure, and it’s perfectly fine to eat the pieces.
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