I first participated in Secret Santa when I was in kindergarten.  I was randomly assigned Greasy Haired Crystal.  Drawing Crystal was a big liability for two reasons, the first, was that getting a gift for a girl meant that everyone would pick on me for being in love with her, and the second was that she loved my mother and called her “Mrs. Isaac.”  I lost sleep over the decision of what to buy and ultimately selected a Disney’s Ducktales puzzle that my mother and I agreed was the perfect way to say “I spent as much as I was supposed to spend on this gift but I definitely don’t love you or want to marry you”.

I don’t know whether Crystal liked her puzzle but I think it’s safe to assume she did not. It’s safe to assume she did not because nobody really likes puzzles, except for my family. Some people say “I love puzzles” – but they say it in the same way other people say “I love raking leaves” which means they don’t really like them, but once had a good time building one during a power outage when they were 10 and there was literally nothing else to do. 

Some families start drinking when they unite for holidays as a way to mute the social friction that results from people having to hang around with their relatives.  In my family, there is no drinking, half because we all find one another tolerable for a couple of days, and because none of us really drinks, which is because my mother is a puritan and would be forced to turn herself in at the next witch trial if someone in our house had more than one beer, or a single mixed drink. 

In my family, our means of peaceful coexistence is the playing of games and the passively competitive building of puzzles which is all facilitated by my father, who holds the record for having suggested playing a game or doing a puzzle more times than anyone in history.  I regard the puzzle making as passively-competitive because it involves everyone else just building the puzzle normally but my father and my middle brother hiding a few pieces so that they can pretend some are missing so they can con the other one into believing the puzzle is in fact incomplete, and then being the last person to play a piece, which is fun for nobody except my father and middle brother.

In recent years my brothers have been having children, which makes us all very happy but has caused puzzle making to play even more prominently in our gatherings because my brothers are always a few minutes away from negotiating an equitable solution to arguing over certain toys that nobody cared about 15 minutes ago, or putting someone down for a nap, or trying to figure out if they should wake their children up from a nap so that they don’t have a hard time going to sleep, even though they always have a hard time going to sleep or staying asleep regardless of how few, or how many naps they have during the day.

My grandfather, who is 90 this year, is one of the greatest puzzle makers of his generation and consistently leads our family’s jig-sawed interests.  It’s true that since my grandfather is 90 he is technically one of the greatest of his generation at everything, but my admiration for his puzzle prowess is the same today as it would have been when he was 55, or 76. 

This year at Thanksgiving he committed 65% of his visit to putting together a puzzle he constructed for his parents during the New Deal which was essentially different shades of gray and green and featured several musicians wearing what looked like ascots but which my grandfather referred to as “waistcoats” 40,000 times.  The 350 or so piece puzzle was approximately impossible to put together because in addition to being handmade by a 14 year old 76 years ago, it was accompanied not by a photo, but by my grandfather’s memory of what he thought it looked like the two times he’d seen in completed which was mostly that there was a guy in a green or blue jacket smoking a pipe and sitting in a rocking chair somewhere in the picture.

I spent roughly one hour staring at the puzzle, put zero pieces into place, and succeeded only in knocking a piece off the table where it was immediately chewed unrecognizable by my dog Wallace, whose lack of appreciation for history is trumped only by his desire to eat things that might make him sick.  I think catching Wallace in the act helped me avoid my biggest ever puzzle related disaster – that is, if you don’t the time I got out of marrying Crystal.