My wife Rita and I did a little Christmas shopping last weekend.

We try not to go overboard when it comes to buying gifts.    Including brothers, sisters, cousins and adult children, there are plenty of people we could be spending lots of money on.

Lately, we’ve been sending gift cards to the adults and focusing on finding appropriate gifts for the youngest generation - the grandkids. A few are pre-teen. Two are teenagers. Last year we had a new addition, Jordan, who is now almost two.

Last week was the first time I had walked through the toy section of a store in a long time. We were looking for something for Jordan, but I didn’t expect to see all the new electronic, mechanical (and expensive) gadgets young kids are playing with these days.

I saw a big selection of battery-operated action figures, cars and talking books. There were mini-toy computers with colorful keyboards where kids could spell out words and the picture would come up on the screen. It seemed like a good percentage of toys had either electronics, moving parts or an audio component.

Things were much less complicated when I was growing up. I can remember some of the Christmas gifts I received when I was very young. There weren’t any electronics and very few mechanical toys back then. Most gifts for kids were much simpler.

One of my favorites was a set of Lincoln Logs. Me and my brother would spend what seemed like hours building forts and having battles using another gift - plastic soldiers. We didn’t need figures that moved. We used our imagination to create whatever we felt like doing. And we built houses, cars and forts using Tinkertoys and Erector sets. That was before Legos.

My parents liked to get us jigsaw puzzles. Not only did we learn how to identify different shapes and images, it also kept us quiet, which mom and dad really enjoyed.

We also got a selection of board games, like Chinese Checkers, Stratego, Mousetrap and as we got older, Monopoly and Scrabble.

Every Christmas I looked forward to getting a Venus Paradise color-by-number set. Some of my brothers and sisters would also get one, and we spent more quiet time working on our masterpieces.

My older brother was into cars, and I remember him getting Matchbox trucks, cars and other vehicles. None of them were powered by batteries, but he still had lots of fun playing with them.

If I had to buy gifts for young kids these days, I’d probably get some of the things I played with as a child so they could use their imagination to have fun.

Batteries not included.