For this installment of our holiday shopping series, we stopped into The Toy Chest at 101 Main St. on Monday afternoon and ...

Instead of a soft, gentle purr, she lets loose a series of loud, trilling noises that sound more like a tiny, ferocious dinosaur than a sleepy house cat. The contrast is hilarious and oddly endearing.

This isn’t anything new: Humans have been scooping up each other’s unwanted swag for hundreds of years. In Europe, the ...