Each year for Christmas we exchange gifts three times with family over a 24 hour period. There’s a lot of moving people and parts and gifts and trash and I’m always a little worried that a gift card or small gift will end up hidden under a pile of discarded wrapping paper and accidentally get discarded.

You never know exact;y what gift (if any) is going to click with a kid on any given particular year. This year, Mason got half a dozen geeky/techy gifts, all of which he digs. He got an electronics kit that allows you to turn any real world object into a USB controller, a watch that tells time in binary, a starter Arduino kit, and several other gifts that have had his mind racing all day. He also got a small, blue, egg-shaped bluetooth speaker.

Like I said, you never know what’s going to be a hit, and within minutes of opening the speaker Mason had it paired to his phone and was walking around playing music for all to hear. The speaker has a suction cup on the end of it and before long Mason had it attached to his forehead. After reminding Mason about the time he stuck something else to his forehead and ended up with a hickey front and center for a week or so, he pulled the speaker off and put it… somewhere.

That was around 7 A.M.

Sometime later Christmas evening, Mason realized the speaker was missing. Telling a thirteen year old to “retrace his steps” for the past twelve hours on Christmas is kind of pointless. He remembered pulling it off his head and putting it somewhere. And unfortunately, he remembered turning it off (otherwise he could have just played some music and we could have followed the sounds).

Off and on, we searched the house for hours. We started by checking the easy places: the living room, his bedroom, the bathroom, and so on. With each new hint, the search posse would relocate. “It seems like I took it upstairs…” he said, shortly before we all migrated up there and poked around. “Or maybe it was downstairs…” he said, his eyes rolling upwards. Back down we came.

Once all the obvious places had been searched we had to escalate things. “Well, I sharpened a pencil,” he said. Great! I searched the armoire to no avail. “I sat on the couch once,” he offered. For fifteen minutes we took turns, with one of us rolling around on the floor with a flashlight looking underneath while the other plunged their hands deep into the couches crevices. Both of us came up empty handed. We looked under the tree. We looked in the laundry room. We looked in the bathtub, just in case.

As a last ditch effort, we went back through trash piles. First was the giant bag which only contained Christmas wrapping paper and boxes. That one wasn’t gross. When that one yielded nothing it was on to the one that contained some wrapping paper along with a lot of party snack leftovers. Yuck. Lots of waffles and syrup in there, no bluetooth speakers.

Then comes the part where you start searching the parts of the house that other people have already searched because you’re convinced the other people didn’t do a good job. So where I had searched Mason’s bedroom and Susan had searched the bathroom, now it was time for her to search his bedroom and me to search the bathroom.

Around 10 P.M. Mason walked into the living room and announced, “Oh, I found it. I forgot, I put it in the bottom of my school backpack.” And just like that, the search was over.