Affiliate disclosure

The Amazon Associates statement

Windup & Wonder is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

Amazon and the Amazon logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. We are not Amazon, we do not sell anything, we hold no stock, and we cannot help with an order, a delivery or a return — those all go to the retailer.

What the links actually do

Product links on this site pass through our own /go address before reaching the retailer. That redirect exists for two reasons: it lets us change which retailer a product points at without rewriting the page it sits on, and it means every outbound commercial link is handled the same way rather than depending on someone remembering to tag one.

Every one of those links is marked rel="sponsored nofollow", which is how Google asks publishers to declare a commercial link. If you buy something within Amazon’s cookie window after clicking, we receive a percentage of what you paid. The price you pay is exactly the same as it would be if you had gone to Amazon directly — the commission comes out of the retailer’s margin, never off the top of your purchase.

What commission does not change

Commission is a percentage, so a more expensive recommendation pays us more. That is the obvious place a site like this would quietly cheat, so here is what we do about it:

• Rankings answer the page’s question. A cheaper toy that better answers it goes first, and a large number of our top picks cost under twenty dollars.
• Several pages on this site exist to argue you should buy less — fewer toys, one good thing rather than five, or nothing at all this year. Those pages earn us less than they cost to write, and they stay.
• Every pick carries a mandatory reason to skip it. A commission-driven site does not print reasons not to buy.
• Nobody pays for placement, and no brand sees a page before it publishes. The full rules are on the editorial policy page.

About the prices

Prices are read live from Amazon and stamped with the date they were read — the current figures are as of Sep 8, 2026. If our price data goes stale, the number is removed from the page rather than left sitting there looking current. Amazon’s price at checkout is always the one that counts, and toy prices in particular move constantly in November and December.

We never publish a price we have not read from the retailer, and we do not quote a “was” price except where the retailer publishes one.

Other retailers

Amazon is our default retailer because it carries almost everything in this category and because its pricing is checkable in real time. Where we link anywhere else, the same rules apply: the link is marked as sponsored if it earns, and it is a plain link if it does not. We do not build tracking links for programs we have not actually joined, and where a link earns us nothing we say so rather than implying otherwise.

Why this page exists

US Federal Trade Commission guidance requires that a material connection between a publisher and a seller be disclosed clearly and conspicuously — which is why there is a disclosure at the top of every commercial page on this site as well as this page, and an #ad marker beside every buy button. We would rather over-disclose than have a reader discover the arrangement on their own and reasonably wonder what else we did not mention.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or you think a specific page is not living up to it, write to info@windupandwonder.com. Windup & Wonder is published by Type 5 Marketing LLC.