Gifts I Won’t Buy For My Nephews (2014 Christmas edition)

I love shopping for my nephews, especially now that two of them are older and like to have a bit of fun. Every so often though, I need guidance, and not the kind of guidance I receive from their mothers, my sisters. I know what toys will choke, maim, or kill them, so the little bit of advice–“guidance”–I get is insulting to my own sense of grownup-erly judgment. Instead, I check out the trends; I see what’s happening around me.

This year, however, the trends are pointing me in several directions I don’t need to take:

  

My nephews love LEGO sets, but they like LEGO sets to actually LOOK like tanglble places and things. LEGO Minecraft looks like…well…Minecraft: 8-bit floating squares used to build blocky things. It’s just…building blocks… and LEGO consists of…building blocks…

So LEGO Minecraft is just redundant.

It’s a game with sticks and balls.

Sticks. And balls.

Hooker dolls with tails? (I mean, what the hell am I looking at here?) Maybe when my nephews are a lot older and have some money saved up…Who am I to get in the way of their hopes and dreams?

This is a robot spider. It is a terrible combination. I saw this once on some science fiction movie with Tom Selleck and Gene Simmons (yes, that Gene Simmons), and it was lethal and not on the “hot toy” list at all.

I don’t know what’s happening, and I wouldn’t know how to teach them to play this game. Is this the Japanese version of Go Fish?

Creepy angel hooker demon dolls. I don’t know…Maybe my nephews will love them…?

It’s a Crazy Cart, and I bet it’s guaranteed to have them projectile vomit.

It’s not that the Walter White action figure isn’t for kids, even though it IS on the “hot” list this year. It’s just that the Walter White action figure is an incredibly boring action figure. He has no nifty superpowers, no cool superweapon or shield. He wears boring clothes, carries a boring bag of money, dons a boring hat and boring pair of shades, and cooks boring meth (where I live, meth is an incredibly boring drug). He just looks like a bald, boring, middle-aged man with a gun in his hand, and that’s his…his “action”?

Oh, my God. It’s a remote-controlled dinosaur on wheels.

My nephews can’t have it simply because…

…well…

I want it.