When Good Hiding Spots Go Bad

I'm not very good at hiding gifts. My kids know all my hiding spots and have unfortunately found things in the past before they should have.

But this year I learned a few things about hiding gifts:

1. A cedar chest with a lock on it makes a perfect hiding spot for gifts.

Earlier this year, we were given a beautiful old cedar chest that had been in the family for years. Since it locked nice and tight, we stored the kids' gifts in there and congratulated ourselves that there was no way they could open it without the key.

And that brings us to the second lesson that we learned about hiding gifts:

2. It is not good to lose the one and only key to the cedar chest.

Just about the time Phil and I were congratulating ourselves on keeping the presents safely out of reach of snooping children, we realized that they might never get the presents.

(And I know what you might be saying: Christmas is not about presents, it's about Jesus. And you're welcome to come over and explain that to my empty-handed children tomorrow.)

We spent a lovely evening combing the house and digging through the trash until one am in the morning until Phil came to the conclusion that the only hope was to try to reproduce the key himself out of a piece of metal. (Fortunately he is really talented like that - remember the old TV show Macgyver where the guy can make anything out of duct tape and dental floss? That's my husband. Also fortunately, he always anticipates the worst, and had previously traced the key and it's measurements).

And so now he's off to Ace Hardware to save Christmas. Should his mission fail, I suppose we will be shopping again tonight. And the cedar chest will be passed down through the generations, its contents always to remain a source of curiosity.

I suppose someday, another hundred years from now, a resourceful descendant of ours will figure out how to get it open and they will discover an EasyBake oven and parts to a fish tank.

Fortunately, we hid the fish somewhere else.