The Lockdown (Part Two)

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Large pieces of cardboard and bags filled with craft supplies filled up the back of my brother's car. My brother and I were driving up to New Hampshire together so pretending everything was normal in the gift wrapping department flew out the window as soon as we left our home. It was all right though, my brothers and I had for the last few years been doing special wrapping jobs. When we reached our grandparents home each of us brought our bags to our shared room. It was a pleasant and relaxing evening with just my parents, my brother, grammy, and grandpa eating dinner and heading to bed. Heading to bed, meaning playing video games together on my brother's switch, but we did eventually fall asleep.

The next day, December twenty-third, I started working on the second safe. I started with the locking system. Creating the mechanism was much quicker this second time being mostly finished before my brother got back from a two hour errand. My grandma arrived around this same time my brother got back joining the family festivities. As the day dragged on, more and more things were done in preparation for Christmas. Christmas can be hard because each person has their own idea of what is important to them. Giving time to everyone's enjoyments is a momentous task as it always seems the days before Christmas go by faster than any other time of the year. I struggled with wanting to jump back into my special safe gift making, something I love to do all alone, yet here were all these wonderful people that I only get to see occasionally throughout the year. They wanted to see me, and I wanted to see them, but I also had such huge ideas for this awesome safe present, idealizing it in my mind. This confliction within myself was hard. I ended up spending the rest of twenty-third hanging out with family embracing all there was. That did not mean my drive for my safe present was any less, but I started to realize this year just how much more important working it is to work towards a Christmas everyone wants, then only seeing your own vision. It made my Christmas better, becoming not a day where I wished I did more, but one in which I enjoyed what I did.

Christmas Eve was hectic, but overall the day was a lot easier than past years. A lot of times, my present creations were just being started on Christmas Eve, but this year I had already completed a good portion by then. In the early morning, I began to work on the safe again. I had the lock mechanism fully finished by now, but actually putting that into a box with a hinge was a lot harder then I thought. One, I ran out of cardboard and had to look with my Grandpa for more, which we did find, but the hardest part was creating equal dimensions between cut out cardboard pieces. Cutting cardboard is difficult because it is a fairly flimsy material, so it bends when cut. This cutting process caused a lot of different heights and widths throughout one single wall, base, side, or top piece. A lot of glue and poky wooden sticks were used to mash all the pieces together. Eventually, an awesome looking safe came to completion. And there was still plenty of time for all the other festivities.

The final piece of the two combinations safe gift idea was the clues. I had already sent a safe to my brother Robert in Reno, Nevada, but I still had to make the clues for my brother Duncan to solve. The idea I was working towards was one in which Duncan's clues would give him Robert's code, and then, Robert's safe had Duncan's code within it. First, I had to think about how I would get Duncan to realize he needed to contact Robert. To do this, I ended up making six clues which when solved gave my brother Robert's phone number. Then, with the last three hints, if solved, a code would appear which was the correct combination to my brother Robert's safe. Through some funny inside joke references and math, I ended up with nine clues that worked all in nine separate envelopes. I went upstairs to bed feeling happy, as I knew everything was in place for the morning. What made me joyous though was the late night conversation that Duncan and I had with Robert over phone right before falling asleep.