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"  Holiday season is upon us! I can&amp;#039;t believe it&amp;#039;s that time of year again! With it comes the announcement of our annual Best Toy Award winners. To find our winners we start by making a long list of new toys that inspire creativity, encourage imagination, and reinforce problem-solving skills. But when you&amp;#039;re talking about toys, paramount to everything is safety. That&amp;#039;s why each toy on our list is evaluated to make sure it meets the required industry standards and passes our GHRI durability testing. Of course, whether a toy is educational and safe isn&amp;#039;t important to the tots who will play with them. So once we&amp;#039;ve whittled our list down to ones that we think have something valuable to offer and pass our safety review, we invite a panel of kids to test the toys for the all-important fun factor.  I&amp;#039;ve often said that my time-space continuum is thrown out of loop working at the Good Housekeeping Research Institute. We pitch ideas 7 to 12 months in advance and test products 5 to 6 months ahead of time; each issue hits newsstands about 2 weeks before the month on the cover. It makes it hard to track what time it is in the real world. For the Toy Awards, brainstorming starts a full year before the winners appear in the magazine. Throughout the year, I meet with manufacturers to keep up on the latest trends and I get a lot of great ideas at Toy Fair in February. By May, my list of prospective toys is nearly complete, by end of May samples have arrived, and throughout June I perform internal lab testing. By the end of June the list of toys for kids to test is finalized, and come July we call in our army of junior testers to help us elect the winners.  This year, 140 children from 3 to 13, helped us test 135 toys. After a morning of hard play, our little engineers told us which toys were fun to play with and which weren&amp;#039;t, which they&amp;#039;d want to play with again and which they wouldn&amp;#039;t. They let us know which were the ones they wanted to find under their Christmas trees or open after lighting the menorah. This year kids were drawn to toys that inspired them - realistic car models, sophisticated art projects, and advanced robotics. Also tops on their lists: new twists on classics and nostalgic toys (welcome back Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!). And parents can rejoice as well, since most of the award winners were under $25!  Check out the December issue, on stands now, for the full list of Toy Award winners. And if you go online, you can see the Runners Up, as well as some of the other great options that hit shelves this year. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/institute/a20418/best-toy-awards-2012/>