Family Christmas Caches?

[+czarbucks]

I figure folks on here have thought of just about everything, so I was hoping to hear what you've put your loved ones through at the holidays. Do you hide things for them, and only give them coordinates? Make up your own caches, and secret them in your yard?

 

I wish I'd thought of this a few weeks ago, even I might have been able to figure out a funny one for The Man. (Although, not having the gps myself might have made this more problematic!)

 

I'd love to hear if folks have done this.

[+StarBrand]

I am doing it for a gift to my 5 year old. He has been working hard to understand the basic use of a GPS and I am hiding one of his gifts. He will do fine.

[+klossner]

For Christmas three years ago, my present was a treasure hunt, put together by my 12-year-old daughters. I got an envelope of homemade jigsaw puzzle pieces. Solving this led me to an envelope elsewhere in the house with this content:

 

From the cats:

mew meow meow purr mew purr

mew mew mew purr mew purr mew purr

mew mew mew purr meow meow meow purr meow

meow purr mew purr meow purr mew mew mew mew

purr mew mew purr meow mew purr meow meow

mew purr

mew meow meow purr mew mew mew mew purr mew

purr mew meow mew purr mew purr

mew meow meow purr mew purr

mew purr mew meow purr meow purr

 

The next envelope contained:

 

Lbh pna tb sne!

 

The next envelope contained:

 

The unused letters are your clue.

g e o c a c h e r

p h c a c h e a s

t i g p s b o x w

h d e r e y o u w

a e e v e n t l k

cache

hide

gps box

event

geocacher

The last envelope contained:

 

Our dainty tree?

Eel spy?

 

The final location contained ... a 60CS.

[Dinoprophet]

I never hid a gift that way, but I did haul all my cousins out for a Christmas Eve night cache in the woods behind my grandparents' condo a few years ago. It was beautiful.

[+Polar B's]

I have never hid a Christmas gift, but I have hid a friend's birthday gift as a cache. I gave him a card with the coordinates. They led him to a pavilion area where I hid the gift in the rafters. I had plans on setting up a multi cache to the gift but I was running late to the party and had to settle on a single.

[+ImJustAGirl]

I had to laugh when I saw your post - I am planning to do this for my mother. Its an ammo can filled with all kinds of caching goodies. I just need to find a time when she is not home to hide it. There are some wooded areas around her home - all private property so there shouldn't be anyone tampering with it. I created a printout that looks like it is a real published cache - I will wrap that up for her.

[+Bamboogirl]

Hubby is getting a new 7 pc. xxxxxxxxxxx for backpacking. He's going to have to work to find it.

[+dark_onyx1982]

Funny i stumbled across this post, I just told my mom today I will be hiding their gifts in a park near her house and all I will be providing the co-ords. I think it will be fun, especially while I am video taping it.

[+joranda]

That would be a get idea. I might try that.

[+czarbucks]

Klossner, your girls are very clever, what a neat thing to do for their dad (parent?) Clearly they've grown up geocaching...

 

Justagirl, that's exactly what I was thinking, right down to saving the html of a cache description and editing it. Darn... I guess this will be another idea saved for next year. I'll bet your mom will just love that gift.

 

People here are so creative - thanks for sharing your (and your family's) ideas!

[+Team Cotati]

No, I do not make my cachers search for a gift.

[Oil Can]

Not for Christmas but we talked about it for hideing Easter Eggs. Every year grandma hides about 100 plastic eggs outside and we can never find them all. There always are 1 or 2 eggs MIA.

[+BiT]

We do something a little different at Easter. We hide the kids' baskets somewhere around the house. Mind you we have four children. We then have four different colored scans of yarn and run it everywhere--through the chairs, under table, over lamps and light fixtures, under the sofa, up and down the stairs, into the garage, though the cars, outside around the trees, in the cupboards, etc... We then tie the ends onto the respective child's door knob and just hope that there is no fire in the house that night. When the kids wake, it usually take them about 20 minutes to follow the yarn to their basket of goodies. They cannot cut the yarn and have to roll it up to get to the end. This allows my wife and I to get a cup of coffee and sit and watch the great entertainment. They have a blast and it is something a little different for them to experience.

[bogleman]

I've set up each one of the gifts for the kids as a 5* difficulty puzzle caches, they are really gonna have to work really hard. Ha, they'll never find them (as if they have anything). For the wife.........a pocket cache comes to mind.

 

Seriously, the kids found most of them already except for that one sweet spot

[+Belfrypotters]

My husband sent me on a multi-hunt for coordinates for my Christmas present two years ago. We live on a treed acreage and he had six micros with partial coordinates stashed all over the forest. A few days before Christmas we learned that our GPSr was set for the wrong map datum, and of course we immediately corrected it. This meant he had to sneak out into the woods and re-do all his coordinates, because they were set using the old map datum. Somehow he managed to get everything fixed without alerting my spidey senses. We both enjoyed the hunt on Christmas day; he especially enjoyed it when I needed a hint for one of the waypoints, because it was such a clever hide.

[+Thrak]

I once read a thread where someone made a hunt for his girlfriend and, when she found the cache, it was an engagement ring.

[+larry739]

This year I gave all my geocaching friends a special geocoin. I wrapped each gift and placed it in a special container with the individual's name on their gift. I left the container under a small pine tree behind a local shopping center at a drive up location. Then I sent them an email telling them the coordinates to their gift. I know most of them got their gifts. The container was gone this morning. I hope they all responded. A couple left me gifts back which I got.