It's Teddy Bear Toss Season

The holiday season is here, which means it’s time for a million videos of minor league hockey fans hurling teddy bears onto the ice. It’s the most wonderful time of the year!

You know the drill. Upon the home team’s first goal of the game, stuffed animals rain down on the ice, and are collected and donated to local charities. Yesterday, fans of the WHL’s Calgary Hitmen contributed a whopping 25,921 teddy bears. That’s their video above; it went on a long time after the clip cuts off.

Here are the AHL’s Hershey Bears, also holding their toss yesterday. They garnered 12,890 stuffed animals, that required a 16-minute stoppage in play to clean up.

Finally, the OHL’s Erie Otters’ toss on Saturday. Erie hasn’t put an official count on the number of bears donated, but that’s a lot of bears.