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Coloring was a year-round childhood pastime in the 1950s, but it became especially valuable during winter, when cold weather kept us indoors. At home and in school, we put our Crayola crayons to steady use.

Edward Binney and C. Harold Smith first marketed the crayons in 1903. Binney’s wife, Alice, reportedly created the Crayola name by combining craie, the French word for chalk, with a word suggesting oiliness. An early five-cent box contained eight colors: black, blue, brown, red, purple, orange, yellow and green.

Coloring was never my greatest passion, though I spent plenty of time doing it. Children generally seemed to follow one of two approaches. Some pressed hard to cover every section with a dense, paint-like layer. I preferred to draw a strong outline and then lightly shade the space inside with the same color. The border helped keep my less-than-steady work contained, and I thought the finished picture looked better.

Using separate colors for the border and interior required more creativity than I possessed. In one Christmas photograph made for my parents, I am sitting in a rocking chair beneath an unusually neat picture I had colored. Someone must have supplied a template.

Coloring books made the activity possible, and dime stores across America carried plenty of them. My favorites had bold outlines and sturdy paper that could survive an accidental tear. The subjects ranged from Shirley Temple and Donald Duck to The Wizard of Oz. Animals appeared frequently, although their many brown sections quickly became tiresome.

A thick, elaborate coloring book might cost 25 cents, while many others sold for a dime. I naturally preferred the expensive versions, and my mother was usually willing to buy them if they kept me occupied.

Crayons also remained a standard classroom supply through the early grades. Although boxes containing 48 colors appeared in 1948, the school sets we used had only a couple of rows. By junior high, crayons had vanished from our supplies, even as 64-color boxes reached store shelves.

The crayons available when I raised my daughters were far more specialized. Preschoolers could use thick crayons designed for small hands. Some had hexagonal barrels to keep them from rolling off the table. Older children could choose fluorescent varieties that glowed beneath black lights or crayons made with scents so realistic that some children ate them, leading to their discontinuation.

One box even included a built-in crayon sharpener on the side—an innovation I considered brilliant.

Today’s children may find traditional coloring less exciting, with laptops, styluses and clip art offering digital alternatives. Plenty of newer options are surely available, probably at far higher prices. That, apparently, is progress.