The holiday season is off and running, with a busy “Black Friday”.

And while TMX Elmo may be in hot demand so far, that doesn’t mean Stacey Daprato, a former teacher and New Jersey mom, is going to hold on to hers.

After seeing her 2-year-old son ignore the giggling, squirming Muppet at playgroups, she’s decided to sell the one she’d bought him for Christmas on eBay.

“He didn’t seem too impressed,” she said.

So what did her son, Mattie, and his friends gravitate to instead? An anecdotal survey of two kids’ play groups in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey found that toddlers ignored many of the season’s hottest electronic gifts in favor of more tangible items the children could grasp and feel in creative control of.

That could spell trouble for this season’s must have gifts like the Little Mommy Toddler animated doll, the Itsy Bitsy Interactive Spider-Man plush figure and TMX Elmo.

Instead of the one-button interaction of this season’s most heavily promoted electronic gizmos, they flocked to a Little Tykes stand-up kitchen with a sink for stacking plastic dishes. They also grabbed up crayons, squished Play-Doh and rocked fanatically on a wooden rocking horse. Maybe the world isn’t as electronic and virtual as some marketers would have you believe.

Indeed, most of the children, who ranged in age from 20 months to 2-1/2 years old, gravitated to toys that left the most up to the imagination. One of the most fought-over items?

No surprise, really. A cardboard box the toddlers took turns putting on their head.