Traditional Christmas Games and Gifts with Jaques London

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I must admit I am a bit of a sucker for anything that can be considered a ‘traditional gift’. My own memories of childhood are of playing lots of games and taking great delight in those times I fairly beat my parents at a board game or two!

We play plenty of games here and we really like the traditional games of snakes and ladders and ludo as well as memory and bingo-style games. We have a few different versions of these and the wooden toys available from Jaques London are beautiful. I’m very tempted to add the wooden snakes and ladders and ludo set to our collection at home as it looks so lovely.

About Jaques London

We have made a really conscious effort this year to try and buy from smaller businesses rather than resort to a certain online retailer. We don’t always manage this perfectly but we are managing to do a fair percentage of our shopping from smaller businesses. Jaques helps to fit that bill and they’re a real family company run by Ben, Emmett and Joe Jaques. I love the ethos of the company and its focus on the more traditional end of the market.

I think I have mentioned before that we are quite low tech and we tend to focus on more traditional past-times so the games on offer from Jaques London really helps with that.

The Products

We were really lucky to be sent some items from Jaques of London to try out recently. We got the magnetic chess travel set and the fab kids xylophone.

I was really impressed with how these two items arrived, they were already wrapped beautifully so if I have been gifting these on the job was already done for me! They are both in a sturdy cardboard box that had a lovely bow around it. The outside of the box has the item name written on it so it’s easy to know what is what. When I opened it up it’s wrapped in a lovely paper with a card inside denoting the name of the person who wrapped it. Certainly a more personal touch than a certain popular website!

The children couldn’t wait to get into the chess set as my older two have learnt to play over the last year. They enjoy playing chess and like to use the large board and set we have at home already, this travel version is perfect for when we next go on holiday as it all folds into a storage case and is small enough as to not take up too much space. As the pieces are magnetic it means that when they’re playing at the table they can lift the board and move it to a different spot if we need the table for dinner etc. They can be confident that the pieces aren’t going to go astray or move into the wrong square! It also comes with a cloth bag to store the pieces in which then fits inside the board when it’s folded shut. I’ve been really impressed with this and my youngest has enjoyed (attempting!) to learn to play chess.

Next up was the kids xylophone. Like many other parents, I am sure, we have had our fair share of musical instruments over the years. I have to say that this is the best xylophone I have seen by a long way. Like the chess set, it comes in a box and as well as the xylophone there are two beaters and some music. What I am really impressed with is that you can actually get some recognizable tunes from this xylophone! Often there isn’t much ‘tune’ from the kids xylophones but this one from Jaques is superb. H loves this and it’s been lovely watching Em share her new found musical knowledge with him (and here trying to accompany his playing with her flute!) I love toys like this that help to spark some early creativity and children often take a real sense of achievement. The music sheets have plenty of different songs on them and none of them are too complex. The notes are named and the colours match the colours on the xylophone to help even the youngest of children to match the music up.

More from Jaques London

The items that we received from Jaques are of excellent quality but also really reasonably priced. I hadn’t come across them before but I know that they’ll be my default site to check for future purchases. I also spotted that they created and share a range of resources so they’ll be another bookmark for me to check in the future. They’ve got a really lovely family advent calendar on there too that’s worth a look.