In six weeks, it will be almost all over. It will be the last shopping day before Christmas, otherwise known as Christmas Eve and it may just be possible to get in the door of a toy store and fight your way to the tills with what is left of the goodies after the shopping army has done its work.

Between now and Christmas and especially in the final two weeks, parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, friends and children themselves will patrol the aisles of hundreds of toy stores and departments and spend, spend, spend.

They will invest an estimated £85 million (€108 million) between them on toys of all description.

People standing at traffic lights carrying enormous lightweight boxes in plastic bags will be a common sight and the main shopping streets of our cities will become manic stress zones.

The challenge in all this is getting the right toys and the keyword to add to your toy vocabulary this Christmas, is Pokemon. This is presuming you are already familiar with the likes of Furby, Beanie Babies, Baby Born and WWF Figures.

Pokemon (pron. Poh-kaymohn) is short for pocket monster and is, wait for it, "huge in the States and Japan". The logic of the toy world is such that what's good enough for them is very soon essential for us. Pokemon has many forms. It's now a cartoon, a plastic and a plush toy, comics, a movie, trading cards, sweets - in short, a real merchandising monster. In four years Nintendo has sold 12 million units of the game in Japan.

Pokemon traces its origins to a Nintendo computer Game Boy. There are two versions of the game, Red and Blue (£24.99 each). It is essentially a role-playing game where little monster creatures captured and trained by the player, fight each other playfully. There are 150 monsters to collect and they retail at £5.99. The cartoon is already on Sky One so the message is out there. The game and collectable figurines are most popular with boys between six and 14, but lots of girls like them too.

Considering each child under 12 will have an average of £103 spent on him or her, there is a wide range of toys to make up the 1999 collection.

Fighting their corner with Pokemon are World Wrestling Federation figures. The little menaces are based on real wrestlers and start at £6.99, but for Maximum Sweat figures with "unique sweat pumping action" you have to pay extra, £13.99. They have colourful names, The Rock, and The Undertaker, not forgetting Stone Cold Steve Austin. Apart from the little figures there are accessories like Wrestling Ring (£29.99) and Championship Belt, (£12.99).

Mr Padraig Smyth of Smyth's toys says the WWF Figures are popular with women in the 18-34 age group in the US but he is not pinning his hopes on that market here.

Market share is divided 50/50 between independent toy retailers and the multiple supermarket groups, according to Mr Stephen Doyle, general manager of Supertoys.

Anyone who survived toy fever last year will remember the Furby phenomenon. The cuddly little critters are still selling well, especially the new and even cuter Baby Furby (£29.99).

"There isn't anything like the crazy demand that was seen for the talking toy last Christmas, but it's still a strong favourite," says Mr Cathal O'Dea of Smyth's in Jervis Street, Dublin.

Mr O'Dea also mentioned Baby Born (£36.99) as a consistent seller in the baby doll range. Baby Born is a multi-functional doll that eats, drinks, cries real tears and wets and soils its nappy. She even comes with a birth certificate. And she is facing some competition from a newcomer who goes by the name of Amazing Amy.

"Loads of people have started doing their Christmas shopping already. We've been very busy since October and we'll be increasing our staff from 30 to 100 in the four weeks before Christmas Eve," Mr O'Dea says.

Beanie Babies are almost as popular with adults as with kids and some lines of these soft bean-filled velvet animals have become collectors' items. They retail at £4.99, but there are Internet sites where people trade the rare ones for real money. The toy is being discontinued at the end of the year, which may be a marketing ploy but people will not mind that. The last one in the series is called The End, it is a black bear and probably will not be available for love nor money in a few weeks' time.

Computer games remain the most lucrative section of the toy shop. PlayStation is the market leader here and has sold strongly in the Republic for several years. It is being bought for children as young as four or five but an alarming number of grown-ups enjoy the games too. PlayStation is now retailing at £95 with the games going from £19.99 to twice that for a popular one like Croc2 (£39.99).

Sega Dreamcast (£249.99), an online gaming console, is new to the market and has Internet features. The Nintendo 64 Console, which is the one for the Pokemon game, costs £89.99.

Eoghan Fitzgerald (3) of Corbally, Co Clare, has been a fledgling consumer for about a year now. He is not very discerning yet, in that he wants everything he sees in toyshops and on television but he has started a low key campaign to get anything to do with Rugrats and Tarzan.

Plush Rugrats characters Angelica, Baby Dill and Tommy in 60cm "Giant" size will cost Eoghan's parents £34.99 each. His parents Sarah and Ger will also have the pleasure of eventually being able to recite the entire script of the Rugrats movie if they decide to pay £14.99 for the video.

Not every child goes for the latest fad and more traditional toys like, rocking horses, buggies, prams, costumes, tractors and trailers, bicycles, jigsaws and board games remain top sellers along with Lego and Mega Blox for younger children.

The undisputed stars of the toy world are still Barbie (from £10.99) for girls and Action Man (from £8.99) for boys. Chloe McCoy (6) from Sandycove in Dublin is hoping for a nice car for her Barbie (Cool Convertible £13.99), Bug's Life characters and maybe a dolls' house. But her mother Michelle expects a much longer list after Chloe has absorbed more of the relentless preChristmas advertising hype.

To get an idea of the range and prices of the toys out there, the website www.supertoys.ie is worth a visit. All the main retailers have catalogues in their stores already so there is an opportunity for a little forward planning on this one.

If you are keen to support home producers - some 95 per cent of toys on the shelves are imported - names to look out for include: Cork-based Gosling Games (Discover Ireland etc), Little Tikes in Dublin (toy kitchens), Bellco in Ballina (footballs), Kestrel in Donegal (swings, slides and basketball equipment) and Belfast-based Mulholland and Bailey (rocking horses).