I love Christmas.. I love the music, I love the weather and the food.. but it's just not the same 😩 idk if it's because I'm older, but It just doesn't have the same happy feeling to it.

This blue snowman tree fits right into my blue and yellow house (3/5!) 🙂

I'm genuinely curious, are there places in the US that have school or activities at school on Christmas Eve? I've always loved Frosty, but also always been so confused why so many kids were at school Christmas Eve

Hi! I’m Marisa LaScala, the senior parenting and relationships editor at Good Housekeeping. There, I work closely with the scientists and experts at the Good Housekeeping Institute — and a not-small number of kids — to test toys. We test hundreds of toys each year, from small collectibles to giant plushes, to cut through the buzz and hype and find out what real families think are the best toys of the year. Toys are fun, for sure, but for us, they’re also serious business. The Good Housekeeping Institute experts and I think about them all year, not just when the holidays roll around. I attend big events like Toy Fair, which happens at the cavernous Javits Center in New York City (which feels almost like Santa’s workshop) to preview the releases coming out that year. Then, we call in our favorites and check them to make sure they have no choking hazards or other obvious safety concerns. Then the real work begins, and we get those hands in the toys of kids and have the kids give us their honest feedback. (In my experience, the “honesty” is the easy part. Kids will really let you know when they don’t like something!) We also ask adults which toys the kids went back to over and over again, and which ones were left to the side. Our favorites get named in our annual Good Housekeeping Best Toy Awards. This year, we tested around 300 toys with about as many families — and since some families have more than one kid and tested more than one toy, everything got played with multiple times. We also had an in-person testing day at our Labs, so we could see which toys kids gravitated to on their own when they were set loose in a room with tons of playthings at their disposal. (Spoiler alert: It was the ZipString.)I’ve been doing this at Good Housekeeping for around five years, so I’ve definitely seen trends come and go. I know that this year, at least, kids still flip for axolotls and Squishmallows. We’re still seeing cool STEM toys emerge every year, but families are also looking for toys with a social-emotional focus too. Gift-buyers are also looking for open-ended toys, like the Bilibo by Moluk, which Good Housekeeping readers cannot stop buying for 2-year-olds. And I’ve learned that LEGO is just as popular among the adults as it is with the kids. That’s definitely true in my home, where I live with a LEGO- and Star Wars-collecting husband and a Godzilla-loving, Pokémon-obsessed 9-year-old. In other words: I’m ready for all your tricky questions about what to get the kids on your list this year. Let me have them! 

My background: I’ve been a writer, researcher and editor for more than 20 years, but switched to the parenting beat in 2015, covering everything from the serious, like childcare and developing self-confidence in kids, to the sublime, like family theme dressing and the best Disney-inspired baby names. I joined Good Housekeeping in 2018, and that’s when I’ve started covering toys in addition to all the other nitty-gritty parenting topics. Before that, I was on staff at Parents and Working Mother, and I’ve also had my writing in McSweeney’s, Bustle, The Condé Nast Traveler, Time Out New York and PopMatters.

Throw your questions down below in advance or upvote the ones that you find the most interesting, and I'll answer live on December 4, 2024 at 12 p.m. US Eastern time (9 a.m. PST, 5 p.m. UK).

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Real tree, ornaments using the Shiny Brite designs from the ‘40s and the Star is from the ‘50s and doesn’t have a plug that goes into modern outlets so I’ll have to find another. But I’m really happy with it.