Legos are a staple toy in many American households. There are standard playsets with figures and themes, like the fire station or rescue squad and there are special story lines like Star Wars Legos, Castle Legos — or Harry Potter. What makes the toy bricks so popular is their versatility. You can take a themed set, like Harry Potter and turn it into a space station story or put Harry on a horse and it’s a Western.
Some Lego sets are very expensive. If you want to tackle the Millennium Falcon set, with its 5,000+ pieces, be my guest, but it will cost you at least a thousand dollars. On the other hand, you can find cheap Legos all over the place — from new sale items to used Legos to be had on Amazon marketplace. With thousands of different sets to choose from, any parent can find just the perfect Legos to fire their child’s imagination. 
It isn’t all about playing out Batman stories or fighting dragons either. Legos are the ultimate house building game. If you are looking for an educational toy, a way to help a younger child understand spacial relationships,then use Legos to help them feel their way through the process. There is nothing quite like handling the toy brick pieces and beginning to understand how the pieces can interlock to create something new. Your child might be on her way to becoming an architect or he might want to build airplanes — and it began with Legos. House building games can be a fun family activity, too. With Legos celebrating over 50 years of making the iconic plastic brick, it is likely that the parent played with Legos, too! And the coolest part? Those 50 year old Legos will snap into modern bricks with ease. Quite a legacy for Ole Kirk Christiansen, the Danish carpenter who started it all.
It is the half century of design and experiment that makes Legos the leading toy brick manufacturer. The others can be a mixed bag. Some are good and some are down-right disappointing. Of course if you are looking for a particular storyline — Halo is a great example — you have to venture outside the Lego universe. You just can’t find authentic Halo Legos. The Mega Bloks are pretty good, but you can tell just in handling them, that they are not Legos. All that said, the company gets serious kudos for getting the look of the ships right. The Hawk and Banshee are excellent. On almost all the sets Mega Bloks pays loving attention to the details that make the finished pieces shine. The stickers and the coloring are particularly faithful to the video game.
When Lego finally offered a product line that featured pink Legos, there was much overdue rejoicing throughout the land. For many years, pink was not a common color choice for this toy. While most children will play with any kind of Lego, many people will automatically consider these toy bricks “Legos for girls.” Our culture has deeply ingrained the idea in all of us that blue is for boys and pink is for girls, and that simple concept governs many of the color choices we make throughout our lives. Fortunately, we have progressed to a point where this standard is really just cultural shorthand, and children of all ages are free to include either color in their building schemes without fear of working outside the accepted norms. (Honestly, what child even cares about such nonsense?) Parents and grandparents, however, are often grateful to have an easy reference like this for gift giving occasions. It is an idea that hearkens all the way back to the delivery room and blue or pink bubblegum “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” cigars. It would be a shame to think that any little girl would forego the joy of Legos because the toys were offered only in masculine colors, but the chance of that happening is now a moot point.
Behold:
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Despite the modern mixing of toy colors across genders, it’s no secret that many little girls do, in fact, like the color pink. (The source of that affinity can be argued forever, and perhaps Disney can be made to answer for the generations of little princesses who have grown up devoted to pastels.) The designers at Lego are certainly no strangers to the idea, and it is obvious they were mindful of all of the elements crucial to a young girl’s imaginary world when they were creating the Lego Belville series. Horses and little dishes and cute doggies abound in this set, and chances are good that little boys who have no knowledge of gender-specific toys will also find them appealing.
The most important quality of pink Legos is the same rugged durability and infinite possibility to be found in every other Lego brick. The vibrant color and the company’s varying of the themes to include less rugged scenarios is a welcome addition. They make for beautiful toys and, like all Legos, encourage creativity, imagination, and problem-solving. That’s the sort of toy that can be handed-down from one generation to the next, no matter what color it is or the gender of the child. Pink is the new Red, Blue, or Green!
