Thrift Week 2024, Day 4: Chromecast

When streaming video first became a thing, sometime in the late 2000s, Brian and I used to watch it by hooking up his laptop to our TV set. When that laptop died in 2010, he built a dedicated media computer with around $325 worth of parts. That served us well for several years, but eventually it started to struggle. We'd have pauses of a few minutes each in the middle of a tense moment on Critical Role as the machine struggled to keep up.

Sometime in 2017, we decided to give one of the nifty new set-top streaming boxes a try. We started out by hazarding $5 on a secondhand Roku at the townwide yard sales, but it turned out to be incapable of streaming from Twitch or YouTube, the two sites we relied on most. This experience made us more cautious about which model to choose as an alternative. We realized that products made by certain companies, such as Apple or Amazon, would probably give us easy access to their own content and make it difficult, if not impossible, to watch anyone else's. So we eventually settled on a Google Chromecast, which was capable of streaming anything that a computer could display. (True, it required a computer or other device to stream from, rather than being a self-contained unit, but that wasn't a problem for us.)

In the six years since, our Chromecast has certainly saved us more than the $30 or so we spent on it. But exactly how much depends on what you compare it to. If you consider it to be the thing that allows us to live without TV service, then it's saving us around $40 a month, the price of Optimum's cheapest plan. Even if you deduct from that the $5 to $15 a month we pay for streaming services (depending on which ones we're using at any given time), that's still a savings of roughly $30 per month—over $2,000 for the approximately six years we've been using it.

But it's probably a bit of a cheat to calculate this way, because it's unlikely we'd be willing to pay for TV service under any circumstances. If we couldn't use Chromecast to watch our various shows, we'd have spent $400 or so on a new media computer instead. That's a much more modest savings, but still a pretty good return on a $30 investment.

It's only fair to point out that just like its predecessor, our Chromecast now occasionally runs up against a problem it can't handle. For instance, it can no longer cast episodes of Critical Role on Twitch from Brian's laptop to our TV—quite possibly because Twitch has now been acquired by Amazon, which doesn't like to play nicely with its competitors. This is, of course, exactly the problem we were hoping to avoid by choosing the Chromecast, which was supposed to be able to cast from any browser window, but perhaps Amazon has found a way to block this capability. (Brian can manage to get the "cast" button to appear by opening up YouTube in a separate tab, but when he tries to cast the screen showing Twitch, it simply quits.) 

However, if the behemoth is hoping to force us into buying a new Amazon Fire Stick to stream "its" content, it's going to be disappointed. We've found not one but two work-arounds: we can either cast from the Twitch app on Brian's phone, or we can skip casting entirely and watch Critical Role on the tiny screen of Brian's laptop instead. It's not ideal, but we'd rather sit on the couch and peer at a tiny screen than give even $30 of our hard-earned cash to Amazon.

Thrift Week 2024, Day 3: Costco membership

Brian and I spent a few years waffling over the issue of whether to become Costco members. In 2012, while visiting the store with my in-laws, I was impressed with its prices on eco-friendly staple items like Fair Trade coffee and organic sugar. But the Costco coffee turned out to be terrible, and the following year I found a cheaper alternative at IKEA. I revisited the idea from time to time, perusing articles with titles like "9 Items that Will Single-Handedly Pay for Your Costco Membership" to figure out if we could get our money's worth out of joining, but the answer always seemed to be no.

What tipped us over the edge was Brian's discovery, in 2017, that he needed progressive-lens eyeglasses. He wasn't prepared to trust an online seller for a prescription this complicated, and Costco's prices were miles ahead of any other brick-and-mortar retailer's. The price they quoted us on a pair was over $180 less than our local optician's—enough to pay for a $60 membership more than three times over.

Once we'd become members, we quickly learned which of our staple items were the best deals at Costco. Some, like oats and raisins, were only slightly cheaper than at other stores where we shopped; others, like walnuts and organic sugar, were ahead by a country mile. In addition to these savings, we got considerable value out of our Costco credit card, which earned us 2% cash back at Costco itself, 3% back at restaurants, and 4% gas stations, all paid out annually in the form of Costco store credit. In 2019, I tallied up all these savings and concluded that our Costco membership was paying us back roughly three times as much as it cost us each year, even when we didn't happen to need new glasses.

Mind you, just because Costco membership has proved to be a good deal for us, that doesn't mean it would be for everyone. Some folks we know have tried it out and found that the prices on most items they buy weren't significantly better than the supermarket's. But for us, just these few staple items, plus the cash back from the credit card, are enough to make it a worthy investment.

Thrift Week 2024, Day 2: Raspberry canes

The second item in my "seven purchases that have paid for themselves" series is the topic of one of my most popular posts ever: our raspberry canes. We bought these in January 2013, planted them in March, and began harvesting our first few berries that summer. By September, I calculated that we were collecting about a pint of fresh, ripe, organic raspberries—roughly a $6 value—every week. At that rate, I figured, we'd get back the $41.50 we paid for them and then some in their first year alone, and we'd continue to harvest the same amount year after year.

As it turns out, that was a gross underestimate. The berries were more productive the second year than the first, and more productive still after we switched to a two-crop system. Production varies from year to year, but over the past three years, these canes have produced a total of 47.5 pints of berries. Meanwhile, the price of organic raspberries has more than doubled, reaching $13.85 per pint. That means in the last three years, we've harvested $658 worth of berries—about $219 worth per year. And we're just now getting to the point where we think we might need to replace a few of the 11-year-old plants.

The crazy thing is, these aren't necessarily the most productive crop in our garden. Last year, our plum trees yielded more than 94 pounds of fruit in total: 37.75 pounds of Opals, 21.15 pounds of Mount Royals, and 35.5 pounds of Golden Gages. The local farmers' market was charging about $2.61 per pound for plums at that time ($6 for a 2.3-pound basket), so our harvest was worth roughly $246, exceeding the value of the raspberry crop. 

However, the plums aren't as consistently productive as the raspberries; they seem to have fallen into a pattern of giving us one good crop every two years and nothing at all in the off years. Also, the three plum trees cost more up front than the dozen raspberry canes, and it took them several years to become productive. So we've definitely gotten more bang for our total buck from the raspberries than we have from the plums, though both have repaid our original investment (in money and time) many times over.

Which brings me to that popular post that the raspberry canes inspired. Most of it was about the process of building a trellis to support the canes so that we could more easily reach the fruit (and I'm pleased to say that after six years, that structure is still holding up just fine). But at the end, I waxed philosophical for a bit about the pleasure these raspberry canes had brought into our lives:

I was heading into the house with a bowlful of fresh raspberries I'd just picked for my lunch, and I was struck once again by the thought, "How incredibly lucky am I to have fresh berries there for the picking, right outside my door? What did we ever do to deserve this kind of bounty?"

Only this time, I realized immediately that I knew the answer to that question perfectly well: what we had done was to plant and tend the raspberry canes. With our own hands, we dug the bed; with our own hands, we planted them all in one chilly spring day; with our own hands, we mulched them and watered them and trimmed them and gave them a fresh dressing of compost every spring; and with our own hands, we built this new trellis to support them. And whenever we want to eat some, we go out and pick them with our own hands as well, braving the scratches for the sake of the berries. We earned this blessing.

And that, I think, sums up the ecofrugal life in a nutshell. It's a life full of blessings that have been earned. Home-baked bread, home-cooked meals, home-grown produce, hand-picked flowers, an abundance of clothing and furniture and books acquired by carefully picking through the offerings at yard sales and thrift stores. And I don't feel I appreciate these blessings any the less for knowing that I've worked for them, instead of having them gifted to me by some gracious and unseen Providence; on the contrary, I think being able to recognize in them the loving labor of my own hands makes me value them all the more.

I'll be back to count more of my ecofrugal blessings tomorrow, as Thrift Week continues.

Thrift Week 2024: Purchases that have paid for themselves

Since last year's abbreviated Thrift Week celebration focused on the least ecofrugal products money can buy, I thought it would be only fair for this year's to go the other way and look at some of the most ecofrugal products. Each day, I'll be looking at one specific purchase Brian and I have made that has paid for itself many times over. And I'm starting it off with one of the first purchases I ever discussed here on the blog: our pressure cooker.

When we bought this back in late 2011, it was kind of an impulse purchase. While visiting Brian's folks for Christmas, we saw an ad in the paper for a 5-quart pressure cooker on sale for $20 at J.C. Penney. On top of that, there was a $10-off coupon that reduced the net price to just $10. Even then, we came very close to passing it up, since we didn't "need" it, but we decided $10 wasn't too much to risk on a gadget that might be able to help us with a wide variety of cooking tasks.

Well, in the 12 years since, we have used this little pressure cooker countless times and gotten far more than our $10 worth out of it. In 2017, I was even inspired to write an article for Money Crashers about all the ways it has saved us money. For instance:

• It saves energy on cooking. It can make all kinds of things—rice, potatoes, barley, quinoa—much faster than a regular pot on the stove, reducing the amount of gas we need to burn for cooking. And the faster cooking time also means we heat up the kitchen less in the summertime.
• It helps us use dry beans. We used to use a lot of canned beans because dry beans, though cheaper, were too much hassle. In addition to requiring an overnight soaking, they needed over an hour of cooking to get them tender enough to eat—far more time than we could spare most nights. Now, we can soak the beans right in the pressure cooker in the morning, turn it on in the evening, and have them ready to use in as little as half an hour. Besides being cheaper, the dry beans produce far less packaging waste, and they take up a lot less room in the pantry.
• It makes homemade applesauce. Another product we used to buy fairly regularly was applesauce to go with potato kugel and other potato-based dishes. Not only did this produce a lot of packaging waste, but often the applesauce itself would start to grow fuzzy before we'd finished the jar. Now, with the help of our trusty pressure cooker, we just whip up a fresh batch of applesauce to go with every kugel. Pound for pound, this homemade stuff isn't necessarily cheaper than the kind in a jar, but it's definitely cheaper than buying a whole jar and having to discard half of it. And it tastes much, much better, even when it's made with the cheapest apples the store has to offer.
• 
  It doubles as a space heater. On cold winter days, Brian often fills up the pressure cooker with plain water in the morning and lets it come to a boil. Then he moves it to the office, where it sits on a trivet atop my desk and radiates heat throughout the day. It takes all day to cool off fully and allows me to stay comfortable without turning up the heat.
  

I'm so attached to this kitchen gadget that if we ever replace our gas stove with an induction model, we'll have to buy an adapter plate so we can keep using it. We could find ways to replace or get along without most of our non-ferrous cookware—our aluminum saucepans, our double boiler, even our big stock pot—but giving up the pressure cooker would be a deal-breaker.

Tackling our home's worst room

The gauntlet has been thrown down. My birthday is still a few days off, but I've already given Brian notice of what home I want for my traditional DIY birthday present. And it's probably the tallest order I've ever given him, because my request is to tackle the very worst room in our house. This one.

This room has several functions. It's a laundry room, a workshop, an overflow pantry, and a storage room for a vast assortment of stuff, including:

• Two and a half bicycles (two complete ones and parts of a third)
• A dozen folding chairs
• A 50-pound sack of birdseed
• Two ladders
• Two fire extinguishers
• 30 gallons of water stored up for emergencies
  
• Our entire CD collection (serving as backup for the digital files we actually listen to)
• My old boom box and cassette tapes, which tend to get used only during power outages
  
• Numerous power tools, including a miter saw, an air compressor, and a wet-dry vacuum
• Assorted containers of paint, stain, glues, and solvents
  
• A sleeping bag
• My seldom-used guitar's even more seldom-used case
• A large box full of equipment for starting seeds

And that's far from a complete list. With all this stuff and more crammed into a roughly 11-by-15-foot space, it's very difficult to find anything. It's also sometimes difficult, and always distasteful, to spend any time in the room. It's not heated at all, and it's lit by two cold-white tube lights (one old fluorescent and one newer LED strip). The floor is raw concrete, the ceiling has exposed joists with various wires and pipes running through, and there are two cinder block walls and two frame walls with the insulation exposed. 

I'm not expecting or even hoping to make this room into a beautiful and cozy retreat. But I do at least want it to be (a) functional and (b) not actively unpleasant to be in. My goals are:

1. To get rid of everything currently in the room that doesn't need to be there.
2. To organize the rest of the room's contents so that I know where everything is and can physically lay hands on it. If I go into the room looking for an extension cord, I don't want to have to pull every box off the shelves until I find the one labeled "wires and cables." (Oh yeah, that's another thing in the room that wasn't on the list above.)
3. To cover up the insulation with something. It doesn't have to be a nicely plastered and painted wall. A sheet of OSB plywood would be sufficient, and certainly preferable to what's there now.
4. To have the room look at least reasonably tidy. I know it's probably still going to be cluttered, but I'd like the clutter to be more neatly organized. At the very least, I'd like to be able to walk all the way around the room without obstruction.
   

Based on our previous track record, I figure we'll be working on this for the rest of the winter and probably most of the spring. But hey, it'll keep us off the street.

Do I really need a bidet?

From time to time on this blog, I've talked about the idea of getting a bidet to reduce or eliminate our toilet paper use. Every time, I've concluded that it wouldn't be worth it. We spend so little on toilet paper that it couldn't possibly save us that much money, and since we use the recycled stuff, it wouldn't save trees either. So I decided the benefits of a bidet wouldn't outweigh the costs, and that was the end of it.

Except the Internet doesn't want to let that be the end of it. Since the start of the pandemic and the ensuing TP shortages, I keep seeing articles everywhere—from the Washington Post's Climate Coach, from the New York Times' Wirecutter, from Consumer Reports—singing the praises of bidets. And it seems like virtually every thread on Reddit about either sustainability or frugality (or, really, almost anything) eventually gets hijacked by bidet fanatics going on and on about how this little device has changed their lives and implying that mine will never be complete without one. It's like some kind of weird plumbing cult.

So I decided I needed to look into this issue in more depth. Am I truly missing out, and/or harming the planet, by stubbornly sticking to my Trader Joe's TP? Or is it the pro-bidet claims that don't, so to speak, hold water?

The pro-bidet crowd makes four main arguments in their favor, which I'll tackle one by one:

1. The financial argument

Many bidet fanciers claim that a bidet will pay for itself in months or even weeks because of all the money it saves you on toilet paper. To back up this assertion, they offer a wide range of statistics about the "average" American's toilet paper use, ranging from 3 rolls per week to 2 rolls per day. (How is that even possible?) The figure I'm most inclined to trust comes from Statista: 141 rolls per person per year. (This is based on a weight of 90 grams per roll; I just weighed one of ours and it's actually a bit smaller, at 80 grams.)

While this may indeed be accurate as an average, it's certainly not true for us. Last time I tracked our toilet paper use, I found that our family of two goes through roughly 68.5 rolls per year, just over 34 per person. Admittedly, I did this experiment at a time when Brian was working at the office five days a week rather than one or two. But according to Brian, even then, nearly all of his toilet paper use occurred at home. So even if he used, say, a dozen sheets per week at work, that only works out to around two and a half rolls per year. That means our TP usage now comes out to roughly 71 rolls per year.

The toilet paper we buy at Trader Joe's has also gone up a bit in price since the time of my experiment, from $4.50 per dozen to $4.99. But at 71 rolls per year, that still puts our annual TP cost at only around $29.50. According to Consumer Reports, the cheapest available bidet attachments cost around $30, so there's literally no way one could pay for itself in less than a year. And Wirecutter's top-rated bidet seat, the $400 Toto Washlet, would take over 13 years to pay for itself—assuming it lasted that long.

That's also assuming that a bidet would eliminate our use of toilet paper entirely. However, it's by no means clear that it would. There's widespread disagreement online about whether a bidet is a replacement for paper or merely a supplement to it. Some folks say they use the bidet first to wash, followed by toilet paper to dry off; others say they wipe first, then use the bidet to get fully clean. Several bidet users interviewed by Consumer Reports said they used less toilet paper since getting it; one said it had cut their family's TP use by about half, while others said they use "up to 80 percent less." If our experience was the same, a bidet would only save us between $15 and $24 per year and would take 1.3 to two years, minimum, to pay for itself.

Except there's one more problem: A bidet would add to our household's annual water use. Each use consumes about two cups of water. If we both used it every time we sat on the toilet, that would be, according to my rough calculations, about 24 cups (1.5 gallons) of water per day. (I'm estimating that we each use it twice a day for a bowel movement and I use it an additional eight times a day to urinate. If we used the bidet for bowel movements only, it would consume only about half a gallon of water per day, but it would also eliminate no more than one-third of our toilet paper use.) 

We don't pay for our household water by the gallon; our town uses a tiered system, and our quarterly water usage is generally low enough to put us into the lowest tier, up to 799 cubic feet. But not by much. Particularly in the summertime, we often get up into the 700s and occasionally even top the 800 mark, bumping us up to the next tier and costing us an extra $23.44. If we were using a bidet regularly, that extra 1.5 gallons per day would make it that much trickier to stay in the bottom tier. If it bumped us up into a higher tier even once per year, that would erase all or most of our TP savings.

In the absolute best-case scenario—we acquire a bidet for no more than $30, it saves us $24 a year on toilet paper, and it never bumps our water bill—it would pay for itself in 15 months. But it hardly seems like it would be worth the hassle for such a small savings. Which brings us to...

2. The environmental argument

The main reason "you need a bidet," according to the Climate Coach, is "to reduce clear-cutting mature forests." Millions of trees, the article claims, go to satisfy American's gluttonous need for toilet paper and our pigheaded refusal to switch to bidets. But once again, this doesn't really apply to us, since our TJ's TP is made from 100 percent recycled paper, with a minimum of 80 percent post-consumer recycled content. (N.b: that means it's made from other kinds of paper, not toilet paper that's been recycled post-flush.) 

Now, tree pulp isn't the only resource that goes into making toilet paper. Treehugger argues that the best reason to use a bidet is because, ironically, they save water. "Paper making is incredibly water-intensive," the article claims, and the wastewater from the process creates "a flood of organic waste and chemical residue which must be processed or, worse yet absorbed, after being treated and dumped into some unlucky river or ocean."

But here, again, it's not clear that the math works out in favor of bidets. According to the Climate Coach, each roll of toilet paper requires about 6 gallons of water to produce. We take about 5 days to go through a roll of toilet paper, so that's 1.2 gallons per day. And according to my off-the-cuff calculations, switching to a bidet instead would use up 1.5 gallons per day—0.3 gallons more than just using paper.

In fact, it's probably even worse than that. When I clicked through to the Climate Coach's source for the 6-gallons-per-roll figure, an episode of the Possibly podcast, it said that "A roll made from 100% recycled materials uses half as much water." Thus, cleaning our butts with recycled TP uses only 0.6 gallons of water per day—less than half as much a bidet. In short, if the main purpose of using a bidet is to save water and trees, it looks like our recycled-fiber TP actually does significantly better.

[UPDATE, 2/15/24: I've since found some more reliable numbers on water use. A little further digging led me to the Environmental Paper Network's Paper Calculator, which you can use to calculate the environmental impact of various kinds of paper use. I punched in the weight of a 12-pack of our Trader Joe's TP (about 2.1 pounds) and selected "tissue" for the grade. It said this amount of paper would use 42.8 gallons of water—3.56 gallons per roll—if it contained no recycled paper content whatsoever (either pre- or post-consumer). If made with 100% recycled paper content, it would use only 22.5 gallons, or 1.875 gallons per roll. Thus, the amount of TP we go through in one day uses only 0.375 gallons to produce—one-quarter of the amount we'd use with a bidet. Thanks to the Handy Finch blog for helping me find this source.

Obligatory citation: Environmental impact estimates were made using the Environmental Paper Network Paper Calculator Version 4.0. For more information visit www.papercalculator.org.]

3. The hygiene argument

A lot of bidet users argue that it's simply not possible to clean your bum adequately with toilet paper alone. One analogy they're fond of using is, "If you got poop on your hand, would you just wipe it off with paper? No, of course not! You'd wash it off with water!"

My inclination is to respond to this with a snarky, "Well, that's because I pick things up with my hands, and I almost never pick anything up with my butt." But in the interests of fairness, I thought it was only right to look into this argument as well. Is a bidet really superior for cleaning?

Amazingly enough, it appears there are few to no scientific studies addressing this question. But as a colorectal surgeon interviewed by Smithsonian magazine points out, "It kind of doesn’t matter." Failing to get every last particle of poop off your bum will not in any way harm your health. There's some evidence that switching to a bidet may offer some relief for people who suffer from pruritus ani (itchy butthole) caused by over-wiping, but there's also evidence that "excessive" bidet use may cause this problem. Another expert interviewed by Smithsonian says a bidet may be helpful for people with specific disorders, such as Crohn's disease or physical disabilities that make wiping difficult, but those problems don't apply to us. In fact, for me, at least, a bidet would more likely do harm than good. Regularly using the "feminine wash" setting on a bidet to clean the lady parts can spread fecal bacteria to the vagina, which definitely isn't desirable. 

[UPDATE, 1/31/24: In the interest of fairness, I should add that a recent "Ask a Doctor" column in the Washington Post cited a 2022 study showing that bidet use doesn't just clean your butt better; it also greatly reduces the amount of bacteria on your hands after you wipe. A small sample group, 32 nursing students, wore clean gloves while using the toilet, and afterward the gloves were tested for microbe contamination. Result: the gloves of the TP users had nearly 10 times as many microbial colonies as the gloves of the bidet users. But here's the catch: as far as I can tell from the abstract, the volunteers did not wash their hands after wiping and before handing over the gloves to be tested. And in the real world, based on my observations in public restrooms, the overwhelming majority of people do wash their hands afterward, even if they don't always do it for the recommended 20 seconds. So I don't think this study provides much useful information about how clean the hands of TP users and bidet users are in real life.]

4. The hedonistic argument

In short, there's no sound reason for using a bidet to promote better health. But for most users, having a squeaky-clean bum isn't mainly about health; it's about happiness. Over and over, I see bidet lovers using phrases like "Once you've tried it, you'll never be able to go back to just paper" or "once you have one you feel like an animal not having it." (That latter one, by the way, was a response to a complaint about how annoying bidet evangelists are.) Some even say they can no longer stand to take a dump anywhere except at home.

Since I've never experienced this myself, it's not an argument I can refute. Maybe a sparkling clean butthole really is one of life's greatest pleasures, and I can't possibly say it isn't worth it without having tried it. But the same could be said about heroin, and I've never found that a compelling reason for trying it. Because the worst-case scenario wouldn't be that I didn't like it; it would be that I liked it so much I couldn't live without it.

This, for me, is the best argument against getting a bidet. I don't want to be a person who can't use a public restroom (or who needs to carry a portable bidet everywhere she goes) because she can't bear to clean up with paper. And even more than that, I don't want to become a person who is so enthralled with her bidet that she can't stop talking about it. I don't want to drive my friends, my family, and complete strangers on Reddit up the wall by telling them constantly why they need a bidet, and they may think they don't, but that's just because they haven't tried it, and once they do they won't know how they lived without it, and anyway it will pay for itself in a month and save the forests, and there's no way to get truly clean with just paper, and how can they stand to walk around with a dirty anus?

If I had found that a bidet truly had significant benefits for my health, my wallet, or the environment, I suppose I would have to bite the bullet and get one, even at risk of turning into an annoying bidet snob. But fortunately for me, none of these things appears to be the case. I'm not telling anyone who has a bidet and loves it that they should stop using it; I'm just saying I see no good reason to get one for myself, and I'd appreciate it if we could talk about something else.

Ecofrugal gifting games, 2023 edition

One of our most successful holiday gift ideas this year was a model of ecofrugality. It provided not one, but eight secondhand gifts for family and friends, with a little extra entertainment thrown in—all for just a few dollars.

Last year's round robin gift exchange with our niblings was so successful that we decided we'd try to repeat it this year. Our original plan was to do it with books again, picking up secondhand ones throughout the year and supplementing as needed with new ones. But last summer, as Brian and I were weeding out our collection of board games, it occurred to me that maybe we could make some of these discarded games the basis of this year's gift exchange. This would kill two birds with one stone: finding new homes for the games we no longer played while crossing eight people off our holiday gift list.

After clearing out our game shelves, we had more than eight possible candidates for the gift exchange. As Christmas drew nearer, we supplemented this selection with others that we picked up at the local thrift shop (some of them still in their original shrink wrap) and at yard sales. We picked and chose among these to get the best variety of different games to fit differing tastes. The finalists were:

• Bali, a word game for one or two players
• Rook, a trick-taking card game
• The Sherlock Holmes puzzle case, a collection of mini-mysteries
• Tantrix Match, a pattern-matching game
• A nice wooden version of the classic peg solitaire game
• How to Rob a Bank, in which a team of robbers takes on a team of security guards
• Anomia, a hectic group game with a lot of shouting
• The Resistance, a social deduction game in which you have to find the traitors in your midst
  

But the gifts themselves were just the start. The thing our niblings (and one nibling-in-not-quite-law) seemed to enjoy most about last year's gift exchange was a puzzle that we threw in kind of as an afterthought: a hidden message spelled out by the first letters of the pages where we'd stashed $5 bills. So for this year, we decided to craft a more elaborate treasure hunt based on clues hidden in all the game boxes. Brian's first thought was to put one clue in each box, so the kids could either collaborate or compete to find the hidden treasure first. But eventually he decided it would be better to make them all work together, so he decided the first step in the hunt would be to put together a puzzle. On the back would be either some sort of treasure map or the first in a series of clues leading them to the treasure.

On a video call with his folks, Brian scoped out the house to find good hiding places for clues. These had to be spots that were within reach, but enough out of the way that the clues wouldn't be found by accident before the game had started. Possibilities included a spider plant hanging in the dining room, a curio cabinet in the living room, an old dollhouse in the basement, and the tops of various tall pieces of furniture, such as the grandfather clock. We thought it would be nice to have all the clues joined by a common theme, and after considering several ideas (names of games? Literary quotations? Cards and suspects from the game Clue?) we came up with one suggested by the plant: species names.

On the back of the puzzle, Brian wrote a winding trail of letters spelling out Clorophytum comosum, the Latin name of the spider plant. We knew they could easily find that out with a Google search, leading them to the plant. In the plant pot, we placed a slip of paper with the second clue: Strix occidentalis. Although this is a real species (the spotted owl), there wasn't a real one in the house, but there was a stuffed animal version of it in the family room wearing a baseball cap. Under this cap, we hid the third clue: Brunus edwardii (magnus). This is not a real species, but a search on the name would lead them to a joke article that appeared in a 1972 issue of The Veterinary Record on common diseases of the teddy bear, and the magnus would tell them the specific specimen they wanted was the one known as Big Teddy up in the sewing room. Big Teddy was holding a piece of paper bearing an entirely made-up species name: Erinaceus horologium. The first half of this refers to a genus of hedgehogs, and the second half is Latin for "clock," directing them to the toy hedgehog sitting on top of the grandfather clock in the hall. Under that was the final clue, Chrysochus cobaltinus. This is a real species name referring to a type of blue beetle; there were no such beetles in the house, but there was a model of a blue Volkswagen beetle in the curio cabinet, and behind this we stashed our treasure chest (a cigar box filled with chocolate coins, jewel-like polyhedral dice, and some other odds and ends).

This gift exchange was a big hit. Once we had all eight youths in the room, we laid out the gifts for them to take turns choosing and swapping, and before they'd even finished opening up all the packages, some of them had peeked inside and discovered the puzzle pieces stashed there. This so piqued their interest that they immediately started putting the puzzle together, not even waiting to look at the rest of their presents, so the adults in the room exchanged their gifts to each other while the youngsters set about solving the puzzle and hunting down the clues. The only part we had to help them with was finding the treasure chest hidden behind the blue Beetle; we'd marked it with a slip of paper bearing the traditional X, but they thought that was just the next clue in the series and had to be directed to the box it was sitting on. We did see at least one of them later playing with the game she received in the gift exchange itself, but I think that the hunt-the-treasure game was more exciting for them than the actual presents.

This has led us to two conclusions for next year: First, we should definitely keep this tradition going. Since we seldom see our niblings, it's much easier to get them something they like by having them swap gifts among themselves than just trying to guess who would like what. And second, since the treasure hunt seems to be their favorite part, maybe next year we should start with the puzzle rather than the gifts. That is, rather than choosing presents and designing a puzzle to go with them, maybe we should start by thinking about what would make the best puzzle and selecting gifts (ideally ones we can find secondhand) to fit it. Because with this crowd, apparently, it's the fun that counts.