I’ve had quite a few friends ask for details about one of our family’s favorite Christmas traditions. We haven’t always done this, but it’s a favorite tradition for 15 years now and any time I’ve hinted at possibly not continuing to do it my children send me looks of horror at the thought.
It all started when we moved into our current home in 2008. Before then, like most families, I bought gifts for our children and hid them away in a secret spot until I had time to wrap and label. But this home doesn’t have any secret spots, no unvisited corners, no place to hide a small trove of treasures to give later. Just a few years before our move, my oldest children and I participated in a national treasure hunt (we were even finalists, but family events kept us from attending the last piece that was an in-person hunt). We had SO much fun doing this together and it stuck with me. And so, here I was in a house where I couldn’t hide gifts away, but with a love for cipher solving, what’s a mom to do?
So that’s when our Christmas Code started. Instead of hiding gifts away, I wrapped them and placed them under the tree. But since we have curious children who shake and squeeze and even sniff packages to see what they might be getting, I had to throw them off the trail. It’s much harder to guess what’s in a package when you don’t know who it’s for. So the gifts were placed under the tree without names. With a handful of children, the risk of forgetting which packages were intended for which child was pretty high, so instead of a name, I used a cipher.
The goal of the children is to solve the cipher before Christmas morning. The goal of the mom (me) is to make the cipher hard enough that they can’t solve it until Christmas morning.
I started with some easy ones – a Caesar shift cipher is probably the easiest – but the kids figured it out so fast I had to add some layers. One of the layers is to add extra letters to their names (because they’d count out the symbols in the code and match it to the children with that many letters). Another layer is to use first and middle names, or to use nicknames, anything to keep them from being able to narrow down the Who on a gift tag.
Some of the ciphers I’ve used are the Caesar shift cipher, hieroglyphs (spelling each name phonetically), morse code, a transposition cipher, a book cipher, a scytale, a pigpen cipher, using elven letters (great for Lord of the Rings fans), and some others I can’t even remember now. My husband always said I should keep a code book with a log of what I do each year, but I never have.
The best years are when I combine the cipher on a tag with a treasure hunt of some kind. Some of the treasure hunts include solving riddles, or completing a word search puzzle and using the remaining letters to find the location of the next clue, or a crossword puzzle and having certain letter locations highlighted for them to unscramble. It’s really as big (or as small) as I’m able to make it depending on how busy I am and how much brain power I have to create the hunt. I’ve had to make it harder and harder as our children have more and more experience with solving our clues. The difficulty is in making it also work for multiple ages. The best example I can give you is what we did this year.
I’ll try to explain, follow along if you’re able. Keep in mind that they weren’t allowed to use phones or the computer for most of this.
The gifts this year were tagged for the children who are at home – Zach, Maddie, Emma, Sophie, and Silas.
- The tags read Epsilon, Gamma, Lambda, Omicron, Beta.If you translate the Greek letters into the corresponding English letters you get E G L O B. Unscramble those and it spells GLOBE. The next clue was taped under a globe we have in the dining room.
- The clue under the globe was meant to be easy and to involve our oldest (Zach) who sometimes loses interest. . The riddle was very familiar to him and read:
“This thing all things devours;
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats mountain down.”
The riddle is from The Hobbit, and the answer is time.
3. The next clue was hidden behind a clock, specifically the one hanging in our kitchen (we don’t have many clocks in the house).
Behind the clock, the clue read:
A + B + C – D =
You’ll need this equation, don’t throw it away
But your next clue is hiding so don’t waste the day.
I’m never too spicy and don’t need to be sweetened.
You cut me on a table,
But I’m never eaten.
The answer is a deck of cards. We have a small cabinet in our dining room where we keep cards and small games. The next clue was tucked into one of the boxes of cards.
4. Inside the deck of cards was a paper that read:
A (at the top and circled)
___ What always sleeps with his shoes on?
___ I have lots of keys but can’t open a door.
___ What color can you eat?
___ Armored like a knight, snapping, but not a twig, always at home even on the move.
___ What gets wet when it dries?
___ I start with an E, end with an E, but only have one letter.
___ I can run but not walk.
Once you know who I am, you’ll need my birth year.
But don’t ponder too long, your next clue is here:
“I go up and down but I never move.”
This one had them stumped for a bit because of the multiple pieces of information. So ignoring the “A” at the top, the answers are: Horse, Piano, Orange, Turtle, Towel, Envelope, River. But they thought the answer to the last one was Nose for a long time. If you take the first letter of each answer it spells HPOTTER (Harry Potter). But since they thought the answers spelled HPOTTEN, they were trying to figure out what Egyptian pharaoh was named Hapotten and when he might have been born. The next part of this clue is the location of the next clue – I go up and down but I never move. The answer is stairs. And the next clue was taped to one of the risers of our basement stairs.
5. The clue taped to the riser was one to involve our youngest, Silas. And really, it was written specifically for him as he sometimes feels left out of the puzzle solving because of his younger age. The clue read:
C (at the top and circled)
“Then came a crash!
An awful BASH!
Things flew into the air!
The ship smashed into a ledge that no one knew was there.”
The story is true –
It inspired this tale.
But you need the real year
Before you can exhale.
Now run along quickly
but don’t run with me!
I come in a pair
But never in three.
Oh no! Another multiple step clue! Let’s ignore the “C” at the top for now. The quote is from one of Silas’ favorite books – The Circus Ship by Chris Van Dusen And the shipwreck that inspired the story actually happened off the coast of Maine in 1836. There’s an author’s note in the book that tells the date. And now for the location of the next clue – the answer is scissors. We keep several pair in a cabinet along with pens and pencils. We also keep two pair in a kitchen drawer – the kids looked there first, but didn’t find anything.
6. They looked in the cabinet and found the clue tucked in with the scissors. This clue read:
B (at the top and circled)
Your next clue is handy
So keep it real close.
I help you the best
When your fingers are gross
Again, we’ll ignore the “B” at the top for now (do you see what the letters are for yet?) The answer to this riddle is soap.
7. Specifically, the bottle of hand soap next to the kitchen sink. Taped to the bottom was the next clue.
D (at the top and circled)
Mister Cow Met a foX Living In the Valley.
You will find your last clue
from one of those two
and then you’ll reach the finale.
This one had them stuck for a while. They looked through nursery rhyme books, books of fables, other books that we have that might be about a cow and a fox, but they didn’t find anything. Finally they thought they’d look at some of the art we have hanging on our walls. In our living room there are four prints that could be of a valley. One of them has a fox.
They looked there but didn’t find anything. Then Maddie remembered my cow painting and looked for it. Sure enough, another clue was tucked behind the painting.
But there’s more information on this clue! It took them only a minute to see that the capitalized letters are MCMXLIV – Roman numerals for 1944.
8. The final clue behind the painting read:
One of the twelve
who followed along
in the taxing booth
I didn’t belong.
The answer to the clue, which they all figured out pretty quickly, was Matthew. So they thought another clue was hidden in my Bible in the book of Matthew. But there wasn’t anything there. This is where I gave them a hint that they needed to look closer at the clues.
The letters at the top corresponded to the equation written on the clue I described in #3:
A+B+C-D=____
They still thought A was referring to an Egyptian Pharaoh. Then Sophie looked over that riddle again and thought nose was wrong, and realized the answer might be a River, spelling H POTTER. This sent everyone into a frenzy trying to figure out when he was born – they looked at movie release dates, book publication dates, and I allowed them to use the internet for this (I actually thought they knew the answer without looking it up). The answer to A is 1980.
They couldn’t figure out what B was referring to. They thought soap. Or the number of ounces the soap container holds. I passed my reading glasses to Zach and told them to look closer and they realized that “gross” was underlined. With the help of Zach’s girlfriend, Anna, they figured out that gross was referring to the number 144.
They figured out C pretty early – referring to the year of the shipwreck – 1836.
D was the Roman numerals MCMXLIV – 1944, though they misinterpreted this as 1964 for a few minutes.
So, A+B+C-D = 1980+144+1836-1944 = 2016
Matthew 20:16 reads, “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”
Let’s go back to the original clues – the names on the tags – Epsilon, gamma, lambda, omicron, and beta – and then put them in order – Beta, Gamma, Epsilon, Lambda, Omicron. Ordinarily, you’d assign each letter to a child in birth order. But according to Matthew 20:16, the last will be first and the first will be last. So you have to reverse the order of the children – Silas, Sophie, Emma, Maddie, Zach.
So Beta was Silas, Gamma was Sophie, Epsilon was Maddie, and Omicron was Zach.
And they actually figured all this out on their own.
So, this concludes the Christmas Code of 2022. Congratulations if you read this far! It was a LOT, I know! I’m going to have to try to come up with the code for 2023 before December. If you have any ideas, let me know! And if you use a form of treasure hunt or code, I’d love to hear about it.