While the holidays are clearly about celebrating different moments for our respective religions, they have undoubtedly become about gifts - giving and getting. While TMX (Tickle Me Elmo X) saw his 15 minutes (and eBay popularity) of fame, the biggest story this holiday season has been the console wars between XBox 360, Playstation 3, and Nintendo Wii.

While the website is simple, I have been following the sales numbers of each console on http://nexgenwars.com/. I have no idea how they're tracking the numbers, but the numbers are believable.

After playing the Wii for the first time this week, I am not surprised to see its solid position as the #2 console in the nerd-war of the 21st century - an accomplishment that seems unbelievable when we look at the performance of the Nintendo Gamecube and even the short life of the Nintendo 64 before that.

In Times Square, parents were frantically asking Toys R Us employees if there were any Wii's in stock and the section dedicated to the Wii was filled with people staring at LCD displays of released titles, despite the fact that no demo consoles were to be found. Perhaps the moment that made me a believer in the Wii's staying power was when a teenage girl standing next to me said to her boyfriend, "That is the bomb system right there. We gotta get one." While this girl could have been a gamer herself, there was no mention of the PS3, or XBox 360, in her comments. In this girl's mind, the Wii was indeed, the "bomb system."

Today, my brother and I visited a CompUSA with 5 PS3's in stock, on Christmas Eve Eve (not a typo, the day before Christmas Eve). While hearing the sales associate say that they had the rare PS3 in stock still managed to take my breath away, I didn't experience a second of remorse walking out of the store without this season's most coveted Christmas gift in my arms. As we searched for the cables that would connect my iBook to my LCD HDTV, it was more exciting and cost effective for me to think about the joy and convenience that this could bring, not the possibilities of owning a $600 piece of consumer electronics.

Let's talk about the price point for a second. $600. For a video game system. Yikes. I still remember when my brother and I sold our original NES (in retrospect, a sale that hurts me in a nostalgic way) at a garage sale so that we could garner enough money to buy a Super Nintendo. After selling a bike, games, the system, and a few other odd items, we were able to buy our refurbished SNES with our own money. But $600?? It's already a little ridiculous that kids today are walking around with cell phones (and Blackberrys???), iPods, and other things that I would never trust my own children with, but a $600 video game system makes me wonder if our society has become so affluent that this doesn't even begin to phase us. Because that phases me... a lot.

We can talk about the Blu-Ray capabilities and how this will be the centerpiece of household entertainment for years to come, but are consumers really willing to drop $600 on an unproven medium in both the video game and home video markets? I have no doubt that Sony will garner 3rd party support and will release some great titles for the system, but the reality is that they're far behind XBox 360 and Wii already (Wii60 as referred to by those who believe in buying an XBox 360 and Wii for the cost of the PS3). It will be interesting to see if the user base of the PS3 can catch up to that of the 360 and the Wii and if there will be enough gamers willing to wait, buy another system, or scrounge up enough cash to bring PS3 the sales it needs to come back in this generation's console wars. Something about HD-DVD just seems to sound better than Blu-Ray anyways. For now, I'm pretty satisfied with my HD upconversion DVD player.

While I hope to have a Wii hooked up to my own TV in the coming months and for all I know, might have a PS3 by year's end, this is going to take a push of epic proportions for PS3 to enjoy the success that PS2 enjoyed in last generation's console wars.