Living in Oak Park for our first Christmas, and lacking a workshop or many tools, meant looking for a new type of wrap. The combination of creating miniature boxed ornaments for family and the presence of many Little Lending Libraries dotted around town resulted in an ornament gift wrap.
Originally, the idea was to replicate one of the Little Libraries in Oak Park and take a walk on Christmas Day to locate it and find the matching book that would contain the gift. As it turned out, we celebrated Christmas with Pete, Alyssa and Emelie in Geneva, so I needed to find a Little Library in Geneva instead. Alyssa knew someone with such a box in their front yard, so images were snapped and the resulting ornament is somewhat close to the one at 112 Richards Street in Geneva, IL.
Of course, we don't often walk around Geneva and pass many of these Little Libraries, so the problem was how to find the matching box. On the wallpaper inside the box, there is a map of Geneva that pinpoints the location.
The contents of the ornament included a collection of specially curated mini-books. Some of these had pages cut out of an Ian Fleming James Bond novel. The rest were blank pages.
With only a few keywords to go on, the challenge was to figure which book in the Little Library matched the book in the mini-library. Using Google, entering keywords from the page above (Bond Shy Smile--proper nouns always make excellent search terms) it would be possible to determine that "Diamonds Are Forever" is a match.
So we bundled up and drove to 112 Richards where Pat and Emelie examined the contents--the book that was placed there earlier in day by Pete and Alyssa. This presented some risk, as anyone could check out a book and if they had fancied Diamonds Are Forever, they would have been surprised to find a pair of raw diamond earrings inside. Pat and Em didn't find the paperback immediately and nearly decided Sherlock Holmes was the right choice. They brought back the right book and there inside a compartment made by cutting out pages of the book (that became the clues) were Pat's new earrings.
Another successful wrap with a good ending.
