The gift showed up two weeks early — and transported me six decades into Christmases past.

The package came from longtime buddy Tom. I tore through the wrapping paper.

As soon as I saw them, I recognized those 3-inch-by-2.5-inch hunks of metal like old friends.

It was a Christmas nearly 60 years ago that I opened a box that held those miracles of childhood — molds that went with the Thingmaker and Plasti-Goop.

This was in 1964 or 1965, long before safety had been invented. Back then, we raced on bicycles without helmets, tossed Lawn Jarts which really could poke an eye out, and heated metal molds up to 390 degrees in the Thingmaker to bake all manner of rubbery bugs, dragons, flowers and fake scars.

Grab the metal mold before it cooled and you could make yourself a real scar as well.

“Toys from the 1960s were the best,” Tom said. “If you weren’t getting burned or mildly injured, you weren’t having fun.”

The mold that Tom sent me came from the 1965 Thingmaker set of Fighting Men. He even molded a soldier and accouterments for me, and sent them with the package so that I could begin to play immediately. I don’t have Plasti-Goop on hand. And my Thingmaker got lost years ago. Mom may know something about that, but she isn’t saying.

Tom discovered a couple of weeks ago — probably when his wife wasn’t home — that if you set a toaster oven just right, you still can bake a fleet of Creepy Crawlers or Fighting Men or Tarzan and hairy friends.

Where there’s a boy tucked inside a man’s body, there’s a way.

Smoky memories of my own set flooded back. A kid could bake wires inside the Army guy so that we could pose him. And there were molds for an ammunition belt, grenades, rifle, machine gun with tripod, flame thrower and other weapons, along with hats, helmets, backpack, shovels and other equipment.

The cool thing was that if you tore the straps while trying to coax the flame thrower onto the back of a 3-inch rubbery plastic Army guy, you could just mold yourself another one.

Or you could burn down the house if you weren’t careful.

I think the directions warned to always have adult supervision. We were upstairs in our bedroom. We figured Mom downstairs in the kitchen was close enough should supervision be needed. Which it wasn’t. Had we asked her before we plugged in the Thingmaker, she might have disagreed. We never troubled Mom with unnecessary details.

When we got bored with our Army men, I plugged in the wood-burning pen I also got for Christmas to see how much smoke I could produce if I pressed the hot part really hard against the little plywood picture I was supposed to trace gingerly.

Those were exciting times — sometimes a bit more than we anticipated.

Years later, I went to work as a press operator in a fiberglass factory. It was a 7-year-old boy and his Thingmaker all over again. Instead of making useful things like centipedes and cockroaches, I was stuck molding stupid stuff like wastebaskets, film developers and sandwich boxes. Being an adult is boring.

But nostalgia … Ah, take me back to when times were simpler and the fireballs weren’t something displayed on a video screen. Who needs eyebrows anyway?

• Cole says the Incredible Edibles he baked in his Thingmaker tasted like plastic. Easy-Bake Oven Christmas cookies would be better. Send recipes to burtseyeview@tribtoday.com or the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.