Santa was tricky this year
The kids woke up to find a lonely, fist-sized gift box under the tree.
There was no name on the box; so they decided to open it together. Inside they found a big red button.
They pressed the button, and Santa's voice said: "You've got mail! Ho, ho, ho!" They ran to check the mailbox. Inside, they found an envelope.
Inside, they found a cryptic letter.
The three biggest fans? Don't look down? Ceiling fans! Here's what they found on the ceiling fans:
Two of the fans were easily reachable with the help of a chair, but the tiki hut fan was too high to reach. Turning on the fan would have been a clever solution. Instead, they went with the leaf blower, which worked just as well. Now the kids had 3 transparent strips with rainbow-colored square patterns on them.
Overlapping them just right revealed a message in the negative space:
To the attic!
Climbing up the stairs, the first thing they found was a double-arrow symbol guarded by a pair of ducks:
Going left and right led them to a pair of dead ends and more ducks.
Each of the three paper signs had staples all around them. Each sign was made of two sheets of paper held together by those staples, and the second pages held three faint messages:
THE BIGGEST
THE HOUSE
BOWL IN
Putting these messages into the right order revealed the next clue: "The biggest bowl in the house." Checking the kitchen didn't lead anywhere. The bowl in question was much bigger than anything found there:
A bottle, some ice blocks, and even more ducks. Inside the bottle was a message. Inside one of the ice blocks was a pair of keys. The situation called for destruction.
The message in the bottle was a two-page pirate's diary entry:
Retracing Mr. Booty's steps led the kids to a far corner of the backyard, where they found an arrow pointing down into the ground with the word "DIG" on it:
The buried treasure was a heavy wooden chest, wrapped airtight, with freezer pads keeping it cool. Unwrapping it revealed the next challenge -- an iron padlock. That's what the keys in the ice block in the battub are for! The chest turned out to be stuffed full of gems and chocolate gold coins.
At the bottom of all that treasure was a hard-to-notice laminated note:
The clues referred to this book shelf:
Following the clues led them to another bookshelf, and a particular recipe book:
Inside recipe book #8 was an unusual folded recipe:
The "ingredients" referred to paintings and other art inside the house.
Hidden in 10 locations around the house, the ingredients turned out to be 2-inch laminated squares containing red and green letters.
Arranging the letters into two words (a red one and a green one) unlocked the next clue: "ABOVE BROOM". At the top of the broom closet, they found a wrapped gift box:
Inside, the kids found a box with a photo of themselves solving a puzzle together:
Inside the box, they found puzzle pieces of a pencil sketch with patches of orange in it, so clearly not the same image as on the box.
The solved puzzle looked like this:
An armpit on fire? A fire armpit? The fire pit! The kids rushed outside and lifted the cover off the fire pit, to find another present inside.
They unwrapped the gift to find a nondescript red box. Inside of it was a smaller brown box; then a yellow one... all the way down to a one-inch tiny box that had a folded piece of paper inside.
The paper had the following picture on it:
The Russian words are nonsense, but when read out loud they sound like the English sentence: "What does this remind you of?" A cascade of smaller and smaller copies of Russian things... Matryoshkas! or as Tim Minchin calls them, "babushka dolls". There is a set of them in the house:
Inside the big one, the kids found more laminated letter squares -- two red ones, two green ones, and some letters of other colors, too. They had to put the letters together with the ones found in art around the house, and group them by color, to get the four anagrams for the next clue.
ABOVE with ML made MOVABLE, and BROOM with ED made BEDROOM. The extra letters completed the phrase "LIKE A MOVABLE BEDROOM". Something that moves that you can sleep in? A car? There were two cars in the garage. The first one had a letter on the windshield with this message inside:
The trunk of the second car had another letter:
They had to get into a front seat to find this note hanging behind the rear view mirror:
"Exactly where you found me"... behind a mirror? only in a bedroom. Two bedrooms in the house have mirrored closet doors. Behind one of those they found the presents.
