Santa's Nano Helpers
Nano iPods are just the beginning. This holiday season, gifts are growing smaller and smaller. A spokesperson for Hershey's (which just shrank its popular kisses into thumbtack-size candy-coated "Kissables") explains the trend brilliantly: There's the "portability" factor. And the "cute" factor. So have a merry little Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa. And we do mean little!
A tiny folding, plug-in hair dryer, a wee alarm clock, and an inflatable neck pillow keep you freshly coifed, rested, and on time, courtesy of the Brookstone 4-Piece Travel Gift Set ($50, brookstone.com ).
Rarely are products as cute and practical as the Sephora Holiday Round-A-Pout ($9, sephora.com ). The little acrylic ball twists apart, revealing four lip glosses with extra shimmer.
Woody's Grooming Body Deo Spray ($13, mensessentials.com ) does triple duty: It keeps you smelling good with a manly blend of sage and bay, hides the scent of recycled dirty laundry, and purportedly contains " pheromones." Voila --a nano chick magnet! - Caroline Hsu
TEENSY TOYS
No nano toys for toddlers! Tohey might swallow them whole. But for slightly older kids (and even some adults), playful stocking stuffers abound.
Alexander the Great sliced through it. A different sort of ingenuity is required to disassemble ThinkFun's Gordian's Knot ($10, thinkfun.com ), a brainteaser for ages 8 and up billed as "the world's most difficult take-apart puzzle." If you need to cheat (and we did), the 69 moves to pry apart the six interlocking plastic pieces are in the instruction booklet.
Posable, multicultural, inexpensive, and only 4 inches high, Groovy Girls Minis ($5 and up, manhattantoy.com ) are a plastic version of the rag-doll Groovy Girls. "A politically correct Barbie," says Susan Hancuff-Sellers of Tree Top Kids in McLean, Va.
Great fanfare has greeted LeapFrog's FLY Pentop Computer ($100, 866-334-5327), which looks like a pen but acts like a computer. "Totally innovative," raves Joanne Oppenheim, cofounder of the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio, which gave the FLY its Platinum Award. With special FLY paper, the Pentop reads aloud, calculates, plays games and melodies, and translates into Spanish. Just don't ask us how!
For elegant design and pocket-size fun for ages 8 and up (and younger with parental supervision), try the Lonpos 101 Pyramid and Rectangle Game ($17, micamericas.com , a Parents' Choice Gold Award winner. Choose from 101 two- and three-dimensional games at six levels of difficulty. Lon-pos.com has yet more options for this U.S. version of a top Taiwanese game.
The Scrambled States of America Game won awards for its painless introduction to geography. This year, there's SCRAMBLED STATES 2 ($6, 800-638-7568), a card game (for ages 6 and up) that requires players to match state cards by region, land mass, population, and color.
Inside each Cube World: stick people sticking together ($30 for two, amazon.com ) is . . . a stick figure! Attach cubes and the figures move from one to another--jumping rope, duking it out, and more. Cube World may not make your kid smarter but will boost his coolness quotient--a huge feat for a battery-powered, 2-inch-square cube. - Julia M. Klein
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