The Toy of The Year

Prepare for the onslaught. PlayStation 2 is THE toy this year.

It's the thing. It's the hot item. It's the trend. It's the topic of the Holiday season which, pholks, is the trick delivered to all of us when Halloween hits the calendar. Even before kids have their costumes figured out and the parents have purchased or made the treats to hand out to all their Halloween visitors, THE toy of the year is being delivered all across the land. But only in certain, well-calculated numbers.

It's a done deal. It's a scheme. It's a conspiracy. It's a shame.

Seems like every year there comes THE TOY or THE GIFT which every youngster MUST have and every parent or Santa must somehow obtain by whatever means they can.

Remember the Cabbage Patch Kids, then the Tickle Me Elmo doll, the Pokemon and other assorted Igottahaveit Christmas gimmicks?

Tell me pholks, what happened to dolls, doll houses, clothes and pretty ribbons for girls and trucks, cars, plastic soldiers, bikes and toy trains for boys?

Those things were always in plentiful supply and at variable costs according to Santa's budget.

But now we have chaos with all this Internet auction and trading and such and orchestrated limited supply garbage. Everyone talks about shark feeding frenzies but any sensible shark would beat water escaping from this crazy merchandising hysteria.

Prohibition paved the way for bootlegging in this country but it's a sure bet that getting a bottle of booze was a hellava lot easier, and probably safer, than trying to get a PlayStation 2 will be this year or Tickle Me Elmo or Cabbage Patch Kid in past years.

Thousands of dumb pholks will be paying up to four times the original cost for one of those things this season. eBay traders already are having a field day auctioning early purchases to crazed parents who have more dollars than sense.

I can see future families passing along stories of how grandpa made the family fortune by bootlegging PlayStation 2s back in double aught and aught one, staying up all night auctioning them for thousands of dollars. It was hard work and he worked the keyboard 'til his fingers bled.

And the family legacy goes back to when great-grandpa did extremely well with those legendary Cabbage Patch Kids dolls. And he and grandma worked without the Internet, going to the stores and fighting the hordes of shoppers to buy as many dolls as they could. They tripled their money and put this family on the bootlegging map.

Even though I don't approve of such things, I find the temptation just too great. I have a plan which should pay big dividends to my heirs.

Starting next summer I plan to buy or obtain one way or another a huge cache of lumps of coal. I will paint faces on each one and call them "Lumpies."

I can't reveal the exact process but "Lumpies" will be protected from counterfeiting and I will have total control of my specific coal lumps. Of course there will be only 500,000 to one million "Lumpies" and they will be offered at only certain locations. They will go on sale at midnight on a certain date and buyers will be limited to only three or four. After a week or two the rest, if there are any left, will go up for auction.

And for millions of pholks around the world the tale of "when I was a kid we were thrilled just to get a lump of coal in our Christmas stocking" will be told to generations who will not realize that that was not a good thing at all.

Also when parents teach their kids that they must be prepared to "ake their lumps" in life and carry on, youngsters will get stupid looks on their faces.