Puzzles Around the Holidays

Every year between Christmas and New Years, my wife and I have a tradition where we complete a puzzle together.  Last year I selected this incredibly complicated puzzle that took us the full week to complete, and we ended up finishing it a few hours after the new year celebration.  This year, she chose the puzzle.  It was a Norman Rockwell theme, and much more fun and interesting.  It took us only three days, mostly in the evenings to complete it.  It is our quiet time to do something together, and we enjoy it each year.  It is our common period of time where we can pass some time and do something like this.

The tradition goes back to my childhood really.  My father always had my brothers and sisters and I working on puzzles during the holidays, and every Christmas we got a new one.  Each year was different, and each year we worked on it as a family between Christmas and New Years.  Somewhere along the line as I got older, the tradition fell out.  I started it again about five years ago when on a whim I got my wife an extra gift one year of a puzzle.  We found we had so much fun with it, that we kept doing it. 

I know it seems silly, and perhaps old school in our modern world where everything is computerized.  It is not the game of it that we find we enjoy as much as just the quiet time which we can detach from the world that is so demanding of us all the time, and it gives us time to just be together and work on something together.  I have included photos of this years puzzle for you to enjoy.