Day 258: Kris Kringle’s Krazy Krossword and the Crack House Christmas

We're in Seattle, doing Bachelorette Party prepping, but here is an entry about the Christmas holidays at my (Claire's) house.

The week before Christmas, I went into my brother’s room one day to find a Scrabble board set up and half finished. The next day, and the day after that, it stayed there, with only minimal changes to it each day. Since my father uses my brother’s room as an office, I knew that the board game was his, in some capacity. I thought maybe my parents had been playing a very slow game of Scrabble each night, and so I asked them.

My mother told me, however, that she had not been participating and said that my father seemed to have been playing Scrabble by himself every night.

This sounded weird, but hardly out of the question.

Then, a few days before Christmas, I was looking at some of the presents under our tree. This was the real tree, and not that the ghetto 18 inch tall Christmas tree covered in white flocking and an “Orphan, Save Me!” sign that we decorated to play a prank on my brother when he got home for the holidays. My brother is particularly obsessive about what the Christmas tree looks. When he saw the sad crack house Christmas tree, with all the newspaper wrapped gifts (they are nearly always wrapped in only newspaper, as my mother tries to stick to her environmental/laziness resolution to never buy wrapping paper) underneath, we told him that we wanted something “different” this year, and a “bit smaller” and that we thought it was “oddly beautiful.”

I legitimately think he would have cried if he did not soon hear that there was a real Christmas tree hidden outside. Poor adult brother.

But back to the presents. So the presents all had weird phrases on them like “14 Down: Use product on this kind of person.” Since normal gift tags don’t say such things, I used my sleuthing skills to figure out that there was some kind of game going on that connected the apparent solo scrabble playing and the presents and the gift tags.

After I got my father to say that I was the genius detective I thought I was, he then told me nothing more. On Christmas morning, though, we had the joy of engaging in another of Lance’s absurd Christmas games.

We each got sheet of clues, and then a crossword puzzle called that looked like a Kindergartner (or a left-handed newspaper reporter) had drawn it. The “destruction” sheet for Kris Kringle’s Krazy Krossword had the following instructions: Work puzzle competitively to assert dominance – or cooperate for “communal achievement!”

It was a riotously fun game, but mostly because the clues were written by an insane person (my father). For example:

12 Across: “Where they live, as Tiny Tony (my brother) called them.”
Correspondent Gift: A Bird House for my mother.
Answer: BUH (this was my brother’s first word. He meant bird.)

2 Down: “Single member of Band.”
Correspondent Gift: A Doors CD for my mother.
Answer: DOOR

14 Down: “Use product on this kind of person.”
Correspondent gift: Pepper spray for me.
Idiotic Answer: BLIGHTER

18 Down: Sissy (Claire), don’t go there
Correspondent Gift: Note reading: “This clue has no gift – Santa’s not that creative.”
IDIOTIC ANSWER: IRAQ

I must say that I really like this game much better than his usual Christmas favorite, “Furno Swap,” in which he varnishes old furniture he finds on people’s curbs and then gives us each a piece. That is a particularly useless game, as we have no room for furniture in our house, and no one ever wants the furniture anyway and it usually ends up back on the curb. With Kris Kringle's Krazy Krossword puzzle, though, we got some legitimate presents. Like pepper spray.