The City Art Centre in Market Street, Edinburgh, is the place to head for during the Christmas holidays, whether you’re on your own or with family or friends. With four different exhibitions to choose from, all of them free and running until January 4, there is something that will appeal to everyone.

Space Age, touring from the Museum of Childhood in London, is the show that has been pulling in most visitors and proving equally popular with adults and children.

This bright, colourful exhibition is absolutely crammed full of toys, comics, clothes and household goods, all related to space-age exploration, design and popular culture. The objects and information (which features “Fascinating Facts” about, for instance, what people wear in space and how high you can jump on the moon) are displayed around five main themes: Space Exploration, Fantasy, Home, Fashion and Technology.

Space-inspired products on show include children’s birthday cards and wallpaper; designer Philippe Starck’s famous citrus squeezer; a lava lamp and moon boots - which looked just as silly when they came out in the 1980s as they do now.

On a more educational note, there is a real cosmonaut’s suit from the 1990s; a timeline showing that, as early as 150AD, writers were producing stories about people visiting the moon; and a piece of the Henbury meteorite which, at 4.6 billion years, is “the oldest thing you will ever touch”.

Visitors should on no account miss the compilation of film clips on space exploration, fact and fiction, featuring everything from Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon to the hilarious 1960s Clangers animations and NASA’s Life in Orbit video from 2006.

Kids can try on space costumes and fill in a Space Age activity book.

www.edinburgh.gov.ukcityartcentre

T: 0131 529 3993 (closed December 25, 26; January 1, 2).