In years past to stop the girls arguing over who had the biggest pile of presents before the actual day we would put raffle tickets on them as we wrapped them and put them under the tree. It also meant we didn’t have to hide them because they could see and not know what was what. Come the morning of the 25th they would get this tiny hand-sized stocking and in that were their tickets. They’d be so busy finding matching numbers and ripping paper off that the box size became irrelevant. It worked perfectly when they were little and we’ve kept doing it because they asked. This year they wanted something different. Not easy to come up with.
So on friday they get a piece of paper in the tiny stocking and that has a url. They go to their url and they find a question. Get it right and they get another question on another url. Repeat quite a few times. When an answer is revealed it could have a ticket number (because we still have those) or not. But they have to do some working out, digging through DVD’s or searching on the net. It’s quite difficult to think up enough questions.

Edit: It’s all going to be images, no questions. So if I take an image of the cast of a film from imdb all they need to do is identify the film. Or a weapon from MW2 – what is it? A company logo, a DVD cover, a slice of action from a video game, actor, personality etc. Possibilities are wide, compiling it is easy but it makes the task a little harder. Which is good. More fun to create.

I was overruled on two:
1. Doing the raffle tickets but their matching ticket would be rolled up really tight and pushed into a straw. Cut all the straws and a few boxes more in half and put all in a bucket.
2. Best one though – you know ball pool balls? I wanted to buy several sets of those (100 per set), make a small slit in some and push the ticket in there. And when they got up the whole floor would be deep in them. Now I think that would have been fantastic but J overruled me. But I will do it at some point, it’s too good a vision to not realise. And why would that be so good? Their faces when they saw it and the fun (torture) they’d have digging through the balls (slicing them with scissors) to find their tickets (and making a supreme mess).