Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas without a black market-spawning toy craze to make the season even more hectic for parents. 

Here are 10 of the most popular fad gifts and gimme gadgets ever to fill Santa’s sack. 

1) Slinky was basically the Penicillin of toys. The idea came to creator Richard James in 1943 after accidentally knocking a specialized coil he was producing to the ground. He watched it slink. That’s all it took.

Initial interest was minimal, but during the Christmas shopping season of 1945, a Gimbels department store in Philadelphia allowed him to demonstrate the gravitational gismo. Customers went gaga. Four hundred were sold in 90 minutes. 

Twenty years later the company relocated to, appropriately enough, Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. 

2) The most popular Christmas toy of 1960 was easily the Etch A Sketch. The original iPad was in such high demand, the Ohio Art Co. factory was still cranking them out for retail on Christmas Eve. 

5) When parents are camping out to buy it, you know you’ve got a hit. And in 1983, Cabbage Patch Kids were the hit. Approximately 3 million of the loveably odd little dolls were sold that December. The legendary craze surrounding the bundles of Christmas joy is actually said to have inspired the 1996 Christmas hit Jingle All The Way starring Arnold Scharzenegger. 

6) In 1996, the employee stocking the shelves with dolls of a popular Sesame Street character at the Walmart in the Canadian city of Fredericton wanted to avoid the Christmas rush. He just couldn’t. The man was trampled by a stampede of more than 300 impatient parents desperate to bag one of the 48 units the store had received. The incident sent him to the hospital and still serves as the go-to example of the power the Tickle Me Elmo phenomenon. 

7) Nineteen ninety-eight t’was the season of Furby—or was it Gizmo? Plenty of people thought the moody, animatronic imp bore a striking resemblance to the lovable fur ball at the center of 1984’s Gremlins, including Warner Bros., which ultimately pressured Furby manufacturers Hasbro to partner with them to produce an officially licensed Gizmo Furby. More than 40,000,000 original Furby dolls were sold over the next three years.

8) With the new millennium came a new mode of transportation: The Razor, an affordable, collapsable, virtually indestructible scooter that in 2000 may have bested the bicycle, and established itself as a Christmas morning icon. 

Apparently it also doubled as a weapon.

9) In 1988, Los Angeles Times Magazine predicted that over the next 25 years, kids would have replaced their dogs with robots. In 2004, it probably seemed like they were. That was the year Robosapiens ruled the Christmas roost at a holiday season sales rate of 1.4 million units. And they weren’t just robots—they were dancing robots that could cut a digital run with any of its own kind it encountered.