Hark, I hear the plush toys from hell singing!

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/12/2007 (6521 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TODAY’S seasonal gift-giving topic is: What to buy for the person or persons you are trying to drive insane during the festive season.

My advice is this: holiday-themed electronic singing plush toys.

If you have not heard any of these singing toys yet, then you are likely what we experienced holiday shoppers like to call “normal.”

If you have been exposed to these ubiquitous electronic creatures, then I can only hope the people who look after you have made sure you are not currently holding any sharp objects.

Ha ha ha! OK, I’m not joking here. I mention this because my wife and I spent four hours — or roughly two months in non-holiday shopping time — in the mall on Sunday.

We were looking for a singing animated holiday toy, the kind which, thanks to a tiny computer chip, can also wobble, walk and gyrate in the sort of fashion you would find highly amusing if you had consumed between eight and 12 beers.

Naturally, we wanted to buy the most obnoxious toy available. There were plenty to choose from.

As nearby shoppers cringed or ran away clutching their ears, my wife and I busily pushed the buttons to activate literally dozens of electronic stuffed toys which, when singing their holiday songs in unison, achieved the same decibel level as a large jet aircraft thundering down the runway.

We had a system. I would turn a toy on, then squint at my wife. “That one’s really horrible,” I would say.

My wife would frown. “Hmmm,” she would say, “it’s horrible but not horrible enough.”

I do not have data to back it up, but I suspect these toys are behind the sharp increase in the number of serial killings in this country every Christmas. The same thing happens at Disneyland with employees who work too long in the “It’s A Small World” ride.

You could tell by looking in the bloodshot eyes of the clerks working in this store that they could not have been happier, not even if we had been wandering around the aisles naked, clutching machetes and setting fire to holiday merchandise.

These, of course, are the same clerks who have been trapped in the shopping mall environment and forced to listen to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman on a continuous loop since roughly two weeks before Halloween.

“If you make those toys sing one more time, we will strangle you with this decorative ribbon,” is what the clerks were clearly thinking, “and no court in the land would convict us!”

But we did not have time to worry about the clerks. We were on a mission. In our search for just the right singing toy, we listened to singing penguins, singing pigs, singing Santa Claus caps, singing cows, singing pigs, singing ocelots, singing weasels, singing hamsters, singing elephants, singing holiday trees and singing paramecium.

We were not shopping for this kind of toy because we wanted to. We had no choice. We are in a war. We did not fire the first shots. Our very dear friends did. What happened was a couple of years ago, these “friends” gave us a huge electronic toy soldier which, when you push his button, marches around, swings a toy sword and plays the theme to the Nutcracker loud enough to make your ears bleed.

“DUM DA DA DUM DUM DUM DA DA DUM!!!” this toy goes over and over and over and over. If you have teenagers like ours, they will want to play this toy repeatedly because it makes them happy at this festive time of year to watch their parents slowly descend into madness.

What our “friends” like to do is buy us one of these toys every single year, leave it on our doorstep, pound on the door, push the toy’s “on” button and then run away before we can open the door and shoot them.

Ha ha ha. You probably have friends like this, too. Initially, we pretended that we really liked these toys. “You are sure swell friends,” is what we told them.

But that was before they bought us the Singing Dogs From Hell, which is a toy that features three dogs in Santa caps sitting on a pillow and, when activated, the dogs shriek “Merry Merry Christmas Merry Merry Christmas” repeatedly in a festive tone that makes it sound as though their fur is being ripped away by packs of hungry ferrets.

Finally, we decided to retaliate. That’s why this weekend we bought our friends their very own “Animated Singing Holiday Pal,” which is a plush hound dog wearing a cap and scarf that lights up, throws back his droopy jowls and howls everything from Jingle Bells to Santa Claus is Coming To Town in the style of a drunken hillbilly.

Fortunately, I am not ruining the surprise here because our friends are in Toronto right now. But think of the look of sheer joy on their faces when they come home and find their new electronic singing buddy sitting on their doorstep.

I think they’ll be crazy about it.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca