It's that time of year again. Time to gird your loins - along with any other appropriate body parts - fight the traffic, and head for the nearest big-box toy store.
If you're a parent or grandparent, consider this your punishment for ever having sex.
So here you stand in the middle of an aisle filled with the best China has to offer, your ears assaulted by the sounds of various moanings, shrieks and begging.
And that's just from the grown-ups.
The kids, meanwhile, are all down on the floor, happily disrupting the computerized inventory stocking system.
Store manager to clerk: "Why is Barbie stuck upside down in the gun turret of our G.I. Joe Armadillo Tank?"
Clerk to store manager: "That's nothing. You should have seen what happened to her in the Easy-Bake Oven."
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Hoping to avoid all that gore and mayhem, I instead headed for the toy catalogs and the Internet this year, which can drive you equally nuts in about, oh, 30 minutes or so.
Let's see, do we want the Sweet Dreams Interactive Baby Doll, the Baby Alive Real Surprises Baby Doll, or the Little Mommy Baby Ah-Choo Doll?
Baby Ah-Choo sneezes when her tummy is squeezed and comes with her own thermometer, pretend medicine, measuring spoon and box of tissues.
You supply the budding hypochondriac.
Meanwhile, the Sweet Dreams doll breathes, takes naps, cries, coos, blinks and makes sucking noises - right up until the batteries conk out.
Finally we have Baby Alive Real Surprises. Wanna know what the surprise is? After she "eats" she "poops."
Of course, we all know what comes out must first go in, which in this case means official Baby Alive doll food. ($4.95 for 10 packets.) And no, you cannot use real food.
And yes, you must also discard the official Baby Alive dirty diapers. ($4.99 for a six-pack of replaceable diapers.)
Why, in no time at all, you will have easily surpassed the original $40 or so this doll costs.
Nobody ever said waste management was cheap - or easy.
As for boys toys, I was struck by this promising wording on one catalog page: "Gifts that inspire good behavior."
Below this inspirational message were two boys locked in combat, one wearing a Spider-Man Web Blaster, the other fending it off with his Power Rangers Transporter. Still waiting on the shelf above them were a Nerf N-Strike Vulcan Blaster and a Nerf Lazer Tag 2-Player Battle System.
Even scarier is a radio-control car that follows a laser beam. Up the walls. Into the bathroom where Grandpa is, um, meditating. Over the cat.
Even worse is the Pixos Portable Pack, including 500 - count 'em, 500 - little plastic Pixos. What fun when Mom's vacuum cleaner clogs up with them. Or Dad walks barefoot over them at night on his way to the bathroom.
The most intriguing thing I found in the catalog was something called Mindflex. First you stick on a headset with sensors that measure your brain activity. Then you concentrate on a small foam ball, trying to get it to move through an obstacle course.
While may be a great way to keep the kids quiet, I find it odd that even with all that brain flexing, the thing still needs six batteries.
I reserve most of my skepticism, however, for the Barbie Glamour Camper, retailing for $75 for what is essentially a flimsy, pink-plastic truck.
Listen, I camped for years in a similar vehicle - minus the pink and the plastic, that is. Glamorous it was not.
No wonder somebody stuck Barbie in that oven.
