Chase For Elmo Lays Bare Our Real Christmas Values

Two birthdays ago, my daughter Emily thought it would be cool to name her new orange kitten after one of the more obscure Muppets.

Ever since that day, Emily’s relatives and pals have commemorated the decision by showering her and the cat with dozens of appropriate gifts:

Elmo squeeze toys. Elmo key chains. Elmo pencil gizmos. Elmo dolls. Elmo trinkets. Elmo toothbrushes. Elmo figurines….

Life is so darn hilarious at the Clark house it just cracks me all to pieces.

But as I discovered while ransacking her room like a cop on a drug raid, we somehow missed giving her the Holy Grail of cheap, Third World-made imaginary animal toys.

No Tickle Me Elmo.

Nada. Not one. Zipola.

“Where are you, you lousy stinking Muppet!!” I screamed, rummaging through her closet. “You’ve gotta be hiding in here somewhere.”

Nothing is so grimly pathetic as a man in the desperate throes of a Tickle Me Elmo binge.

But fools all over the nation are bidding big bucks for these things as if they were priceless Rembrandts or Mickey Mantle rookie cards.

South American coke lords have suspended their drug trafficking to deal strictly in stolen Elmos. Shoppers are disemboweling store clerks. Kermit, green with envy, hired a mafia triggerman to snuff his scene-stealing foe.

Here in Spokane, this newspaper’s classified ads have been oozing with Elmo scalpers hoping to cash in on this madness.

I want one, too. I want to pay off my house.

Unfortunately, I’m up to my bald spot in worthless Elmos and feline Elmos, but no Tickle Me Elmos.

“I looked at one when they first came out, but didn’t buy it,” my wife, Sherry, confessed the other day. “I thought it sounded stupid.”

Shocking betrayal from the woman I love.

Soon, Christmas 1996 will shamble in and lurch out like Jacob Marley’s chain-bound ectoplasm. The Tickle Me fever that has this nation in a holly jolly stomach cramp will fizzle into a festering memory that - like voting for Nixon - someday will haunt us all.

With no chance to make a big score of my own, I spent the good part of an afternoon calling black market Muppeteers.

April, for example, is hawking her unborn child’s Elmo to the highest bidder.

Her sister-in-law sent the doll from Minnesota. When the Elmo crisis struck, there was only one moral thing to do:

“We can always buy one later,” says the expectant capitalist, who is due to give birth the day after Christmas. “Hey, he won’t know the difference.”

Shelley of St. John stumbled upon her Elmo like the lost Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

She was shopping at Costco when “I kicked a box that was down on one of the aisles. I turned the thing over and there it was - a Tickle Me Elmo. The clerks couldn’t believe it. They’d been out of them for days.”

Shelley paid $21. Now she’s hoping for at least a Lear jet.

Greg Pickthorn is so disgusted by this yuletide greedfest that he called me to express his Tickle Me contempt.

“These scalpers should show a true act of civility,” he says, “and donate all those Elmos to kids who don’t have the opportunity to get them.”

Greg. Greg. Greg.

Kindness? Generosity? Unselfishness?

That’s Mother Teresa’s gig. This is Christmas in America, bud.

Suckers are lining up to be fleeced. Let’s sing “Joy to the World” and get out the shears.

If some fool wants to sell the farm for an Elmo, so be it.

I haven’t a clue what makes this crappy toy so valuable. When you squeeze the thing it chortles in such an obnoxious voice that the manufacturer should rename it Strangle Me Elmo.

I could see paying a premium for a Tickle Me Elvis. But it’d have to be the fat Vegas Elvis and he’d have to sing “Burning Love.”

, DataTimes