Christmas is a magical time of the year and in Minnesota one of the few times that no one is really upset by the snow. Including my transplanted hispanic family from the south.
We absolutely love Christmas and for our traditions Christmas starts on December 24 with Christmas Eve and goes until January 6th on Three Kings Day. For us this whole time frame is Christmas.
My family will often play games at Christmas ranging from board games to more intricate puzzles. For most families a puzzle would have a beautiful Christmas scenery or a fun character on it. However, for my family it’s a list of clues and riddles that someone has to figure out in order to find their present.
In full disclosure I am usually one of the family members given the puzzle and to this day have yet to solve one. The game normally ends when they give up on me solving the puzzle or I find the item by searching for it alone.
When I make a game for one of them though it goes a little bit differently and is usually just a game for myself. Christmas 2019 was one of the years that I did this. At the time my father had decided that he could only hang his coats on a brown hanger and everyone had to use a white or blue hanger. Only he could use the brown ones.
So being the good daughter that I am, I systemically took all of the brown hangers out of the coat closet. Every time he left the house, if I was home I would grab the hanger, replace it with a new one, and hide the brown one under his bed.
He knew that it was me and could not find where I had been hiding the hangers. It drove him absolutely nuts for the about week and a half that I did this.
Until one evening right in the middle of Christmas I moved the hangers. The next morning he comes to breakfast to find all of his brown hangers dangling above the table from the chandelier.
This was probably one of the best games I’ve ever played during Christmas and was also the reason my mother started having me go into work earlier.