Baskets ached. Wallets groaned. Never-ending queues of bargain hunters waited to pay. Stressed parents stuffed their trollies. It was Black FridayThe day after US Thanksgiving, when lots of shops offer discounts on goods for Christmas shopping. - the day people buy their toys for Christmas. 

Children live and breathe toys. And parents cannot stop buying them. The average American family spends $600 (£497) a year on toys. A typical 10-year old in the UK will have possessed around 238 toys, worth about £6,500. The toy industry is worth $90bn (£75bn) a year.

To play with toys is part of human nature. There have been toys almost as long as there have been children - or possibly before. Numerous animals, from rats to Komodo dragons, have been observed playing with objects such as sticks and stones.

There is evidence for toys stretching back to 20,000 BC. The Ancient Egyptians played with marbles,¹ the Ancient Greeks with stone yo-yos. In 1824, scientist Michael Faraday invented rubber balloons.²

But it was in the late 20th Century that toys exploded. Inventions such as LEGO (1949), Play-doh (1956) and Barbie dolls (1959) became world famous. Giant corporations started mass producing toys. Dolls and action figures began piling up in houses.

Toys are not just for fun. Play helps children to learn about the world around them. Scientist Siobhan Kennedy-Constantin says: "In play, children are testing and refining theories, making connections, understanding relationships and figuring out how the world works." 

Some toys are designed to help this. Talking to a teddy bear or doll can help us develop social skills. Jigsaws can help with problem-solving. LEGO bricks can encourage creativity.

Yet we do not need toys to teach these things. "The creative mind," wrote psychoanalystA practitioner of psychoanalysis, a set of psychological theories first laid out by Sigmund Freud in the late 19th Century. Carl JungA Swiss practitioner of psychoanalysis. Initially he was a collaborator of Sigmund Freud's, but his ideas diverged from Freud's and the two became bitter rivals., "plays with the objects it loves". Child psychologist Deirdre Brandner says "any household object" has opportunities for learning.

Mass produced toys can teach bad qualities. They can make us greedy to collect them all. They can make us wasteful - an estimated 8.5 million new toys a year are thrown away. And they teach us to be uncaring: many are produced in appalling conditions, including child labour.

Yes: Think of the environment. The toy industry is, according to the UN, "the most plastic intensive industry in the world" - and most toys end up in landfill as pollution. Cut the toys to save the world.

No: Think of the parents. Toys are fun. They can be educational. But they are especially important because they keep children occupied. Without them, parents would have no bandwidth for anything else.

Or... Almost anything can be used for play - a peg, a pebble, a pencil and paper. We should stop buying commercially-produced toys and start finding the toy in the objects that surround us.