Puzzles, Puzzles, Puzzles!

Our family likes to put puzzles together. It’s so fun!

The tradition started a long time a go when I was a little girl. We usually had a puzzle out on a card table at Christmas time, and whenever we wanted to we would sit down, either alone or together and put pieces in the puzzle. Whoever came over to our house during the holiday could sit down for a few minutes and visit and put the puzzle together. As the puzzle would progress and get closer to being finished, more of us would gather around the puzzle. Finally, when there were just a few pieces left to go there would suddenly be no more pieces, but several empty places in the puzzle! We would all ask each other, “Do you have one of those pieces?” We would each smile and say, “I don’t think so….”. This would go on until someone would finally put in the puzzle piece that they were hiding in their hand under the table. We were all trying to be the one to put the last piece in to complete the puzzle. Then we would all laugh and admire the puzzle, and be a little sad that it was all finished.

As my own family began, we also liked to play with puzzles. We had a few wooden puzzles and added to our collection over the years. As the children got older we began the tradition of putting out a puzzle at Christmas and putting it together over the holiday time too.

This is a picture of Curtis and I in December 1998 when we lived in our Springville, Utah house. This year we even put together a 3 D puzzle. Can you see the sky scraper? Our favorite puzzles lately are pictures from the artist James Christensen.

Here is one of our latest ones that we put together here in Bakersfield.

We used to just break the puzzle up and put it back into its box to do again another time after they were finished, but lately we’ve been saving the puzzles by putting a coat of ‘liquid puzzle saver’ on them. Curtis would like to use them as pictures on his walls and we have several saved for him.

Want to try a puzzle for yourself? Just click on the picture of the fish. Here you go!