Budget Christmas Shopping for Kids

People between the ages of 5 and 12 are the most fickle human beings on the face of this planet. It's hard to satisfy them. They're old enough to communicate in a language you can understand, but they don't often make any sense Christmas shopping for preteens just got easier. Just pick out any combination of the following items, and you r chances of getting a positive response increase exponentially.

Christmas gifts for kids: Putty.
The wonderful thing about putty is, it's made of magic. That's the easiest way to explain it's greatness. You can take unfunny comic strips, copy the image of an overrated and talentless hack of a character, and manipulate it however you want. It's shear genius!

Plus, it can be used to double your investment in news papers. These soon to be extinct relics of yore might be worth a lot of money some day. With enough putty on hand, one could make a hansom sum of dough via patients and duplication.

Putty by it's self probably won't equal large sums of money over time, but it's still a pretty interesting relic. Did you know that a small chunk of putty single-handedly won the first World war? Plus, it's been used by NASA to plug holes on space stations? It's not true, but your kids probably won't question it!

Christmas gifts for kids: Used electronics.
Refurbished electronics are abundant of auction sites. A Sandisk portable media player is a great gift for any music fan. Retro video games are also great. A good game will remain good till the end of time. unlike milk and bologna, they never go bad.

Nintendo's Game Boy has a pretty decent library of titles. aside from popular series' like Mario Land, Pokemon and Legend of Zelda, there's games like ... Plus there are a good number of compilation titles like Konami GB Collection and Defender/Joust which pack more than one full game in a single cartridge!

Sites like eBay and Half.com are selling Game Boy Color systems for dirt cheap. If your young'un already has a GBC, buy them a small lot of games to play on it then. Nintendo's game Boy systems are great devices for killing time. Also, they have a knack to quieting down restless souls who find it hard to just sit in the back of the car, and not kick the seat on long road trips.

Christmas gifts for kids: Magic 8 ball.
Contrary to what it's name might imply, 8 balls are not infused with any sort of magic. Sad but true. It's actually just an orb filled with blue liquid, and some weird multi-sided dice with words on it . The only magic involved comes when it's predictions turn out to be stupid luck. Kids will come up with an endless amount of unanswerable questions to ask magic 8 ball, and it'll be serviceable when it comes to randomly spiting out vague responses.