The Christmas Scavenger Hunt
A Kennewick family tired of the standard tree tradition invents a complex, house-wide treasure hunt for their holiday gifts.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
One family who were over the stocking-hanging age decided last Christmas that they could not have a tree. The children were disappointed and feared a stupid day. An ingenious sister solved the problem of gift-giving in a somewhat novel way. She asked all the members of the family to wrap their gifts for each other into neat packages, direct them plainly, and leave them in the library on Christmas eve. No one was told what was to be done with the packages, and each member was sworn to secrecy. The girl divided them into groups, having one gift for each member of the family included in a given lot. The separate collections were then taken into different rooms of the house and hidden in such a way that they could not be found without considerable searching. On Christmas day, a small boy of the family dressed in the costume of a Christmas herald of Elizabethan days went through the house every hour during the day blowing a trumpet and proclaiming that a Christmas hunt would be held in a certain room. The family had a merry time until all the gifts were found and opened, and they enjoyed them in a leisurely way until the next visit of the herald an hour later. As the family was a large one, the excitement was prolonged well into the evening, and all voted it a much more interesting way of giving presents than to have them all in the morning stockings or hung on the Christmas tree.
“All voted it a much more interesting way of giving presents than to have them all in the morning stockings or hung on the Christmas tree.”
Modern holidays are often characterized by consumer exhaustion and the rush to rip open gifts in seconds. This century-old account of 'gamified' gift-giving offers a nostalgic look at how families once prioritized communal activity over mere accumulation.
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