Living: O.K., Santa, Make My Day

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It is late Christmas Eve, the tree is up and listing at something less than 15 degrees. Not perfect, but acceptable. The kids will sleep until dawn. Insufficient but unavoidable. The pres- ents are wrapped, all but that one saved for last. A favorite. One that should be freshly assembled and brightly functioning when the kids charge into the room in . . . can it be just five hours?

Grab an eggnog and (anticipating technical problems) a few elementary tools, then sit down with Spacewarp. Picture on the box looks great. Grinning boys watching steel marbles roll over course that resembles a Disney World ride for reckless ball bearings. Open the instruction book. And -- the horror! the horror! -- it looks like something from J. Robert Oppenheimer's sketchbook. Maybe the words of Johann Stonehouse, national sales and distribution manager for Bandai America, will soothe: "You're not getting your money's worth if it's not hard. It's a challenge. It's a good item for a family project." There! That's it! Family project. Just the thing to work on with the children and perhaps, too, with some holiday phone help from Cousin Jonas, who has, among other sterling qualities, full tenure at M.I.T.

So wrap Spacewarp, settle down with another eggnog and consider the bounty under the tree. The regenerating myths of toys may have as many classical permutations as the collective unconscious, but the listings in most contemporary toy catalogs can be reduced to three basics. Spacewarp, for example, falls into a category that could be called . . . build it.

Here is where modernism and tradition meet as snugly as two curved tracks in a set of electric trains. It is a given that this is an age of futurism and intricacy in toys, and indeed some Transformers are wondrous and devilish at once. The Decepticon Trypticon (about $56) is a gray, green and purple animated dinosaur that turns -- with some flips, tucks and fast snaps -- into an entire city. Transformers (a mainstay of Toy & Hobby World's Toy Hit Parade) have lots of modern dash, but electric trains still have romance enough to lure any kid away from a video game. Purists note that Lionel may not be all it once was, but the H-O gauge lines of Marklin and Roco, Lima and Liliput, chug as reliably as ever, and the large-scale LGBs, made in West Germany, could be the grandest toy trains ever. A starter set (about $330) with a steam locomotive and two passenger cars is a richly detailed invitation to further excursions that can be plotted from the elaborate LGB catalog, which is a real itinerary for dreaming all on its own.

Childcraft's superb sets of large wooden blocks (ranging from $35 to $200) are crafted to be the foundation not only of manual skill but of imaginative construction that older kids can carry forward into Fisher-Price's excellent $5-to-$38 Construx sets. These will yield an armada from outer space that & might handily be reinforced by some vehicle from the cartoon-linked but still lively MASK series, or by the formidable Giant "vertical climbing system," a rumbling series of interlocking rough-roaders (scant assembly required) that can make it over cartons and well up walls.