Christmas Crap Award Winner!

There was some tough competition this year, with contenders including a Mega Blocks monster thingie whose head falls off and a doll house with flimsy cardboard walls that knock down all the furniture inside when you touch any part of the house. The hands down winner, though, has to be the incredibly cute piece of carcinogenic crap called the Strawberry Shortcake Karaoke Set.

This was an impulse buy at Toys 'R Us, and it's likely the only present that we'll be returning. I should have read the Amazon reviews, which mention things like carcinogenic coatings on the parts and lyrics inappropriate for young kids. In our case, however, the lyrics complaint wouldn't have matteredd: we never heard the songs on the tape.

Every time we put a tape in the thing, it ate it. Three for three. Each of these incidents necessitated a ten-minute surgery to extricate the gnarled tape, during which time our daughter would suck on the carcinogenic microphone.

Even better, this battery powered product has no power switch, which means that the power light is always on, always draining the batteries. What a great design concept this is! The only way to turn it completely off is to remove the four C batteries with a screwdriver? Brilliant!

I'll let my daughter sum it up best:
"Let's do something else, Daddy."