Christmas Puzzle

“When I was growing up, every Christmas we would get a puzzle to solve as a family. By coincidence, there was a family next to us that also got a puzzle to do every Christmas. Now, my father is in the military and I have one brother, so we had a small nuclear family of four people that approached our puzzle in a rather military-like, hierarchical fashion. But the family next door had eight kids and dozens of relatives hanging around all the time, so their puzzles were solved in a far more chaotic way.

At our house, the puzzle was always placed on the same table with two chairs, and if you wanted to work on the puzzle, you had to wait. Further, the puzzle was done in a very organized fashion. You first found pieces for the corners, which could take hours just going through the box. The second job was to fill in the border. Only when these first two jobs were completed would you work on some inner section, and even then there was a rule that you were to look for pieces that could be identified by the color or pattern of the section being worked on. So when you sat down at the table you had to find out where we were in the process and move ahead logically.

Of course, growing up in the family it seemed perfectly normal to me. However, I noticed that the people next door did not use a ‘puzzle table,’ but worked wherever in the house they happened to be sitting. Also, sometimes six or seven people would be working on the puzzle at the same time. Some were looking for corners, some just found three or four pieces that fit together, and some thought they’d like to do a border. Although they worked in this very chaotic way, their puzzle always got done before ours. It made me mad because we were so much better organized.” From Terri Holbrooke, “Novell’s Ten-Thousand Piece Puzzle” in the book The Infinite Resource by William E. Halal, Jossey-Bass, 1998.