Have you ever wondered how far a grandmother would go to get the hottest Christmas toy for her baby granddaughter? I never did until I witnessed how desperate my mother was to get a Cabbage Patch doll in the early 1980's. A fist-punching brawl between mothers and grandmothers at Toy "R" Us that forever changed my childhood.

A shorter version of this 950-word essay was first published in Soft Whispers Magazine (November 2009).