Calico Critters or Sylvanian Families

The Calico Critters Company makes delightful sets of animal families and play set-ups for children. You can choose from a variety of animal families, including mice, cats, bunnies, hedgehogs, pandas, yellow labs, elephants, and squirrels. 

Besides the starter cottage illustrated below, you can find a variety of play sets, such as shops, schools, day cares, and park scenes. Furniture and accessories, too, are available to add to your animal homes. There are furniture sets for bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms, and bathrooms.

Calico Critters even have cars and a train for transporting your little creatures around their animal village. 

These Calico Critter animal creatures have quite the imaginative world built up and ready to go. Of course, if you prefer, you can just get the family of critters and build your own imaginary world with recycled boxes and paper towel tubes. It's all up to you.

Calico Critters Ellwoods Elephant Family

Calico Critters Hopscotch Rabbit Family

Calico Critters Wilder Panda Bear Family

I can remember spending long summer days playing with little stuffed animal critters in the woods with my friends. We would each make up a little home compound at the base of tree, using the exposed roots that bulged up from the ground as rooms where we would set up house with our collections of animals and figurines.

Setting things up was half the fun, but once finished all kinds of espionage and clandestine adventures would occur as we would try to infiltrate each other's make-believe worlds.

I would have been delighted with one of these Calico Critter families at the time. Because they look like real families, with a mother and a father and a brother and a sister, the Calico Critter families take on definite personality characteristics. Children can act out all kinds of fantasies using these creatures and their relationships with each other.