Throughout most of my childhood, there was never anything in my stocking come Christmas Day. My family hung stockings, but they were purely for decorative purposes, at least in part because everyone exchanged gifts at midnight on Christmas Eve, and by the morning, there was nothing left to give.

This was also an early lesson in the downside of instant gratification for me, because it sucked to wake up on Christmas morning and have nothing left to open. Oh, poor underprivileged me. At some point during some long ago season, I took a stand and demanded stocking stuffers. By the end of my various tirades, everyone in the family agreed to contribute to my stocking being stuffed. My plan backfired. While it was obvious to me that I was telling everyone to add stuff to my stocking in addition to whatever "real" gifts they were going to give me, they took it to mean that I only wanted gifts that would fit into a stocking. I ended up with dozens of five buck knickknacks, but very little else. I've learned to be more concise in my material demands since then, and despite that one little holiday hiccup, I'm still in love with the idea of the stocking stuffer.

And stocking stuffers are a good thing to be in love with, because every year, toy and et cetera companies go through a lot of trouble to formulate small-sized packages with holiday flair. Formerly, we'd just look for things that'd fit into stockings and call them stocking stuffers -- stuff like Matchbox cars and maybe the errant pack of baseball cards. Now it's a booming industry, and here are some of 2006's contributions to the trend I heart.

I know that we tend to vilify the Bratz collection, but I've gotta commend 'em on two things. One, for spearheading the movement to make it okay for little girls to dress like cheap hookers. Two, for having some of the bestest toy packaging in toy packaging history. Seriously. I've had to buy a lot of Bratz crap for my 4,000 nieces, and I'm always amazed when they take the dolls out of their packages and I realize just how overpriced they are. It's the packaging that makes Bratz toys so appealing. Like, certain dolls come with 30 tiny plastic accessories, and instead of going the normal route of shoving those 30 tiny shitty plastic accessories into a little baggie and tucking 'em deep within the package, the designers give each its own little indented display on the see-thru plastic window. It's brilliant.

Even here, where all you're buying is this thumb-sized baby figure with a shaky head, it all looks so sophisticated and totally worth five bucks. These girls have a "passion for fashion," usually exemplified by some form of cartoony print panties. I tells ya, we really can't fault toy scalpers for snatching up the hottest Bratz toys for eBay auctions. They already paid for their crime by looking like big fat pedophiles on the checkout line.

Fun Fact: One of my favorite X-E Advent Calendar entries made use of a Bratz sushi bar playset.

Also up for stocking stuffer grabs are tubes containing three miniature G.I. Joe Sigma Six figures. The tubes aren't easy to photograph, and though the cynic in you doubts that they were officially meant to be stocking stuffers, here's the proof: A note on the package encourages us to check the toy aisle for more Sigma Six products, and there would be no such note if these tubes of goodness weren't crammed in the stocking stuffer section of toy and department stores.

I'm not terribly crazy about them. The figures feature a molded, non-articulated base, but have like 10,000 points of articulation around their torso. There's not much point in being able to swivel Snake Eyes' chest backwards if you can't do shit with his legs. Other figures come without a base, but stay in the club by having non-posable legs anyway. Methinks the concept would've been better served if they figures were just more literal size-downs of the proper 3 3/4" versions, which would've made them both adorable and more suited for battles on the S.S. Whatever Toy Boat You Have.

Simple enough, Play-Doh now sells two-packs of ornament-shaped containers filled with toy-know-what, in colors that correspond to whatever color the ornament is. So, yeah, I got silver and green. After sitting at the table for 15 minutes trying to think up the perfect thing to create that's generally synonymous with that color combination, I've determined that our culture has absolutely nothing particularly known for being silver and green. Help a brother out?

Posted by Matt on 11/13/2006. E-mail me!