Gifts for Athena - The Hunt

Like many kids, my niece Athena loves a good mystery. Recently, I've started hiding her gifts. Last year, I gave her a card containing the first in a series of rhyming clues that she had to solve to lead her to her treats. This year, I took her love for crossword puzzles and combined it with a word scramble to give her the location of her gift bag. Believe me when I tell you it is much easier than it sounds to do this.

Start by deciding where you're going to hide your gift. I picked a spot in the house known as the Chair Closet. Next, I looked over a list of holiday words and assigned each letter in my location to one of these words. For example, I needed a "T" in my crossword, so I picked the word "Mistletoe" to be a part of the puzzle. Once you have all the letters accounted for, do an Internet search for crossword puzzle generators, like the one at Crossword Puzzle Games. The generator I used has a 20 word limit but some of the other generators allow you to add many more words. The more words you use, the better looking your crossword will be. Chair Closet only allows for 11 words, so I picked out 9 more to fill the puzzle out.

Perhaps the hardest part of this idea is coming up with the clues. Now, before you say "Oh, I'm not clever enough to come up with clues", I point out that you don't need to put in any brainpower. You need a dictionary and a thesaurus and that's it. Type your word into the dictionary and then into the thesaurus. Choose whichever clue seems better. For example, you've used the word jingle. Jingle is a metallic clanking noise and synonyms include chime, clatter, rattle and ring. Your clue can then be as simple as "clatter" or "rattle" or it can be more specific like "A metallic clanking noise".

Sometimes, crosswords offer hints in the form of common phrases that are missing a word. In the case of our "jingle" example, your clue could be "_____ Bells". See? Very little clever thinking required. Of course, once you get going, you might find that it's easier to come up with puns and the like to use for your clues. All the better!

When you're done entering words and clues, the computer generates the puzzle. Easy peasie! Everyone will think you're a supergenius. For the word-scramble part of my treasure hunt, did a screen capture of my puzzle and opened it in Photoshop. I changed the color of key letter squares to red and green. If you don't have editing software, you can do this by printing out your puzzle (make a couple copies) and highlight squares with green and red markers.

The purpose of the red and green squares is to indicate which letters need to be unscrambled to find the hidden gifts. Because "Chair Closet" is a little long, I used the red squares to highlight the c's and to show where they belonged in the puzzle. If you want to eliminate the word scramble, you could choose letters that appear in the correct order in your puzzle so that the hunter only has to write them down in the order they appear to find their gift.

This sort of hunt is good for any occasion. Use spring words for Easter or spooky words for Halloween. For a birthday, use clues and words that describe or mean something to the birthday boy or girl. Use religious words, if holidays are a spirtual time for your family. Use rude words to get a laugh out of jaded teenagers and childish grownups. Your crossword treasure hunt can be anything you can dream up and makes giving a gift more than just opening a package.