It’s no secret that the winter holiday season is by far the biggest shopping season of the year. In the United States alone, consumers spent nearly $600 billion this year. With all that money flying about, you can’t help but wonder just what exactly people are buying, so we decided to take a look at some of the more popular items this year.

Top Sellers: MP3 Players

MP3 players take the crown this year for top selling consumer electronics. The best selling MP3 player: Apple’s 4^th generation iPod Touch, and it’s not all that surprising, considering that the iPod Touch has been in the top spot of our MP3 Players for quite some time now. It seems that the iPod Touch’s inclusion of the iTunes App Store was the driving source behind its strong sales. iPods lacking the App Store, such as the Nano and Shuffle, weren’t particularly strong sellers this year as people chose cheaper alternatives, like the Sansa Fuze. The Zune HD also sold well with those who don’t care for the taste of the Apple Kool-Aid.

Runner Up: Digital Cameras

Similar to the MP3 player sales, there was a very clear dichotomy in digital camera purchases, with the majority of sales being either expensive SLRs or cheaper point-and-shoots. The midrange digital cameras were not a big seller. The best selling SLR was Canon’s EOS Rebel T2i, one of our highest ranked Digital SLR Cameras. The best selling Compact Digital Cameras really were scattered across the board, but the majority were sub-$100 cameras.

Bronze Goes to: Blu-Ray Players

For the past couple years, the falling prices of HDTVs have let them dominate the holiday sales figures, but this year, things were a little different. It seems many people already owned an HDTV now and felt it was time to transition fully into the HD era. This of course led to Blu-Ray Players making it among the third best selling electronics of the 2010 holiday season. The drop in price also helped as well, like Sony’s BDP-S470 internet connected Blu-Ray player going on sale for just over $100.

Other Strong Sellers

Advertising appeared to work out very well for some products this last holiday season. The Kindle‘s aggressive attack on Apple’s iPad resulted in excellent sales for the Amazon e-Reader. The Xbox 360 saw a strong bump in sales, thanks largely to the brand new Microsoft Kinect motion based controller, which absolutely dominated in gaming related sales.

Of course, if you really want to get technical, gift cards were actually the number one selling item this last holiday season, and by a very wide margin. Roughly 75% of shoppers bought at least one gift card. That’s several billion gift cards sold world-wide. To put that into perspective, very few electronics sell more than a million units over the holiday season, but hey, who’s counting?