Frenzied Toy Quest Doesn’t Tickle This Mom

Forget Tickle Me Elmo. Somebody, please, find me Fashion Magic Fingernail Fun.

For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, Tickle Me Elmo is the nation’s hottest-selling--or at least most sought-after--toy this Christmas. Stores are selling out as quickly as they can unload the little guys from delivery trucks.

Shortages have prompted near-riots at stores across the country, where anxious parents are lining up by the hundreds for a chance to claim one of the furry, red gnomes of “Sesame Street” fame.

The quest for Fingernail Fun has not yet reached those heights. But the desperation is real and growing among parents like me--the mother of three little girls whose Christmas dreams are not visions of sugarplums, but glamorous, jewel-studded fingernails, like the kind on TV.

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To parents left in the lurch when demand exceeds supply, it feels like a cruel trick, a sinister plot by toy manufacturers who get their jollies watching frantic parents scurry from store to store through rain and snow.

But toy makers insist they take no pleasure--and indeed, suffer financial pain--from the popularity surges that unexpectedly make some toys Christmas standouts each year.

“We’re not in the business to make people feel bad,” one local toy company manager assured me. “I’m a grandfather myself. I know what it feels like to not be able to find that one toy a kid wants. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.”

The process of moving a toy from the drawing board to your shopping bag begins more than 18 months before Christmas, when toy buyers from the nation’s major chain stores preview the toy lines each manufacturer will offer and rate them based on their projected sales potential.

Then, at a toy fair held each February, the buyers make their own Christmas lists, placing orders for the number of toys they think their stores can sell. That signals toy companies to begin production and stores to plan their promotional campaigns.

Toy commercials begin running on children’s TV shows in early fall, just after the first set of orders arrives on store shelves. Generally, the stores quickly get a sense of boom or bust, but by then it may be too late to ride the crest of the wave.

Some toys--like Ninja Turtles, Cabbage Patch Kids and Power Rangers--become so popular, stores can’t keep them in stock. Others land with a thud. Witness the proliferation of Disney’s “Hunchback of Notre Dame” paraphernalia on clearance racks this season.

In the case of Tickle Me Elmo, the people at Tyco Preschool--a division of the company that also makes Fingernail Fun--were caught off-guard by the huge demand.

The toy had generated only mild enthusiasm at the February toy fair, and focus groups of moms thought it ho-hum. But after an unsolicited pitch on Rosie O’Donnell’s TV show, sales took off.

Based on early store orders, Tyco, which has a West Coast office in Encino, had anticipated selling about 300,000 of the plush toys. But by October, sold-out stores were placing frantic orders for more. Tyco stepped up production to the maximum--50,000 Elmos a week--by running its toy factory in China around the clock.

Now, it hopes to sell 1 million Elmos by Christmas.

Typically, a Tyco rep told me, it takes 16 weeks for the company to make a toy and get it here by ship. But no more slow boat from China. Now, he said, “every day, planes filled with Elmos are flying in.”

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The to-the-wire toy hunt has become an annual Christmas ritual for me, ranking right up there with climbing a rickety ladder in the rain to fasten a string of flashing red-and-green lights along the eaves.

Last year it was Barbie’s Bubblegum Shop that almost sent me over the edge. Every San Fernando Valley toy store was sold out. I had friends and co-workers scouring stores from Pasadena to Orange County and coming up empty-handed.

I ultimately snagged the toy the day before Christmas Eve and blew a rare chance at romance in the process.

I was on my first date with a dignified--and childless--gentleman I’d met at a singles dance a few weeks before. On our way to a movie in a Westside shopping mall, we passed a toy store that was unplowed terrain. I grabbed his hand, yanked him inside and dragged him to the Barbie aisle.

He watched in stunned fascination as I hiked up my dress and climbed the shelves to the top, then let out a loud “Whoooo!!” when I spotted the coveted toy tucked behind Barbie’s motor home.

I was on Cloud 9 the rest of the night, lugging that huge, pink box to the theater and then to his car, babbling about how happy my 4-year-old would be. My date was considerably more subdued, wondering, no doubt, what had turned me from a charming dinner companion into a parody of a woman who desperately needs to, as the kids say, “get a life.”

I never heard from him again.

Still, I took such pleasure in the look of joy on my daughter’s face on Christmas morning. She played with the toy for all of 45 minutes before casting it into the toy box, where it sits to this day.

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This year I’ve searched stores from Valencia to Orange County in search of Fingernail Fun. I’ve visited every Toys “R” Us in the Valley, checked with dozens of Target and Wal-Mart and Kay-Bee stores. And the answer is always the same: sold out.

Like Tickle Me Elmo, Fingernail Fun was a surprising success for Tyco. Aimed at girls from 6 to preteen, the kit was expected to be a modest hit by retailers, but by early fall, a Tyco rep said, “stores were calling every week to say the product was moving much faster than expected.”

By the time stores began featuring it in their advertising circulars earlier this month, supply was already trailing demand, and desperate parents by the hundreds had begun calling Tyco’s Encino office for help.

I knew none of this when I tucked the newspaper ad into my purse and headed for Target for a quick lunchtime shopping trip. I’d been wandering the toy aisles for 20 minutes before I let myself consider the unthinkable: Fingernail Fun was gone.

Other mothers around me were coming to that same grim conclusion. One of them ambushed a hapless store clerk and began waving the store’s ad in his face, while the rest of us circled him with our shopping carts, like the zombies in “Night of the Living Dead.”

“But I’m not toys,” the red-faced clerk kept sputtering. “Dave is toys.”

The crowd of frantic women grew larger, and one began hyperventilating when Dave showed up and announced that the store might not receive another shipment before Christmas.

I’m sure I saw tears in the eyes of another--a business executive type wearing a suit and high heels. “I’m getting a migraine,” she said as she tucked the rain check into her purse and stumbled toward the door.

“This is a nightmare . . . just like last year.”

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I have friends, most of them childless, who wonder why I’m so manic at Christmastime. Why is it so hard to just say no to my children’s requests?

I do sometimes. Their lists always include toys that I tell them in advance not to expect--it costs too much or your sister already has one or Mommy just doesn’t approve.

But I can still remember what it feels like to be a child at Christmas--the anticipation of Christmas Eve, the restless sleep, the predawn rush down the stairs . . . and how it sometimes ends with a crushing sense of disappointment at the discovery that the thing you wanted most isn’t there.

I know my children would survive, that after the tears they’d recover enough to enjoy Christmas Day. And I know there are great moral lessons to be learned from doing without.

But there have been plenty of hurts and disappointments in my children’s lives, and there will be plenty more. We do strive for balance during the Christmas season, and they know that the joy of giving beats receiving.

So on Christmas Day, once each year, I want to be like an angel who swoops down to bless them with the things they want most, and makes them believe in miracles.

I would believe in miracles too, if I could just lay my hands on that wretched Fingernail Fun.