There's No 'Hot Holiday Toy' This Year. Can Christmas Even Happen?

It’s a holiday tradition as American as eating too much and falling asleep in a chair while inane football comedy blares loudly from the flatscreen — adults deciding that all kids should be just nuts for a Hot Holiday Toy, and then redirecting that hysteria into ruining Christmas. This year, however, a problem: there is no Hot Holiday Toy.

There’s no Tickle Me Elmo, there’s no Objectify Me Tween Dream Bratz Doll, there’s no whatever Arnold Schwarzenegger was trying to get in that horrible holiday comedy Netflix keeps recommending to me (ed: Jingle All The Way). For this year’s holiday season, parents are just going to have to give their girl children boring ol’ Barbies and their boy children boring ol’ Legos, like they’ve done since forever. Here’s the Washington Post, quoting a sad, sad marketing analyst,

“There are no hot toys this year; there really aren’t,” said Gerrick Johnson, a toy industry analyst at BMO Capital Markets. “We don’t have a Tickle Me Elmo or a Zhu Zhu Pet or a Cabbage Patch Kid — nothing that is approaching phenomenon status.”

If that speech wasn’t preceded by weeks and weeks of toy industry analyst Gerrick Johnson sequestered in his beige little office, frantically tearing open toy packaging and examining the products inside before saying “No, no, no, no! NONE OF THESE ARE IT! THIS IS NOT THE TOY! DAMMIT WHERE ARE YOU, DREAM TOY!? SHOW YOURSELF!” before dissolving into hysterical laughtears, I’d be surprised.

So, onto the important question: with no Hot Toy for adults to ruin with competitive greed and neuroses, can Christmas even go on? Will we have to send Santa a Snapchat that’s like “XMas Cancelled :(” over a picture of a crying Rockefeller Center tree with an X drawn over it? Is Christmas shopping for kids’ toys so entwined with being an asshole that one can’t survive when separated from the other?

If anyone’s interested in some freaking out for old times’ sake, my little sister still has like 200 Beanie Babies and a 1996 price guide to their future worth.