The Christmas Puzzle

A Family Scene
Originally uploaded by Prairie Brown

One of my family's Christmas traditions has always been that Santa brings a puzzle, and during the holiday vacation, everyone chips in and we all work to put the puzzle together before the end of the break. Traditionally, this meant that since most of the people in my family have education related professions, we had around a week at least to fit the puzzle together.

This year, however, as in many recent years, we found ourselves, due to grown up children's busy schedules, with only one weekend in which to do the puzzle. Additionally, Santa had chosen a very challenging puzzle: a hundred brilliantly colored butterflies, broken into a thousand tiny little pieces.

Fortunately for all of us, my sister Kima is a puzzle expert. She sat right down to the task and inspired the rest of us to dig in as well. In 48 hours, the puzzle was complete.

It was my job this year to document the task, as I've never been terribly good at putting puzzles together (some visual-spatial gap in learning, I suppose). There are more photos up on my Flickr page, both of the puzzle party and of my holiday weekend with my family in Vancouver.