As children prepare to gather around the Christmas tree to open gift-wrapped toys, lets take a moment to remember some of the toy recalls that companies, parents and even children probably should have seen coming a mile away. Because after all, children shouldn't be the only ones who can't sleep the night before Christmas.

5 The Cabbage Patch Snacktime Kids Doll

It's not entirely surprising that a Cabbage Patch Kids doll ended up trying to eat children. They've always had lifeless shark's eyes that look ready to roll over white and enter attack mode. Sure, it's outstretched arms look innocently huggable to a child, just like the moist mouth of a Venus fly trap looks like a perfectly good place to land in the final moments of a fly's life.

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The doll was unleashed on the masses in the fall of 1996 and more than 500,000 were recalled less than a year later by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. It was supposed to eat little plastic snack foods through a motorized mouth. Lord knows how the kids got the plastic foods out of them once they were done eating them, but in many unfortunate cases, the doll instead developed a taste for bloody scalps.

Parents reported their children's hair, fingers and skin getting caught in the doll's gullet, which turned out to be so powerful, it could even rip hair clean out of its roots. There were also more difficult to confirm reports of the doll's eyes suddenly turning a bright red and the room temperature dropping 15 degrees Celsius every time you turned it on.

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The CPSC ordered a recall and Mattel offered a $40 refund. They did not offer the copy of the Necronomicon that would give parents the power to send the doll back to the bowels of hell from whence it came.

Why they should have known:

Any parent with low-lying, unprotected wall sockets or sleepy pets will tell you that children love to put their fingers into anything and everything their tiny, chubby arms can reach. It's their nature. Because they can't talk and don't have the motor skills or experience to understand pain, the best way they can learn about this weird world they've just entered is to either stick it in their mouths or shove their arms halfway down it. The Cabbage Patch Kids Snacktime Doll was much too big for children to swallow, and it had a motherfucking motorized mouth, so you do the math.