Progress?

Okay, I just don't have the time or energy to track down screenshots or blow-by-blow analysis of the clues. But for those of you following from the non-pressured leisure of your own living rooms, I can give you this:

1. The garland used three-color sequences to stand for individual letters. When decoded, there was a seriously long rhyme essentially mocking us, and was quite hilariously accurate.

2. The box contained sweatshirts! They have Hook Puzzle Team 2016 on them, as well as mysterious letters (still not solved). The player numbers on the back are also so far unsolved.

3. Anything with color uses the same letter identification. We have the following messages:
  A. "Thank your lucky stars it is only playfair." (This is on the message you get by clicking the star on the Christmas tree; the text part of the cipher is therefore not a substitution code, but rather Playfair)

  B.  "Forget the Books! Five Hooks need to look behind four hooks in Appartamento B!" (which led to more QR codes, specifically http://www.hookchristmaspuzzle2016.org/deckthehall.html

J BO GCLVQE DGUXFOU UJH LGB ZQX XCQX JU B UASI PH DQRONK. This last translates (using shifting Caesar, where the amount of the shift depends on the placement of the letter in the word) to "I am fairly certain the key you want is a type of cookie." I then proceeded desperately to try every type of cookie I could think of, down to snickerdoodle, without success.

  C. "Sometimes you need to look at a puzzle from a different angle" was the code on the physical puzzle.

4. The airport codes updated to "At last it is Christmas and all of the pages are up for decoders."

5. If you click on the Christmas tree lights, you toggle the caption at the bottom. We have not yet decoded the cards, but the letters read "Rearranging the lights does not seem to have any effect."

6. If you use the light sequence on the bottom row of the Christmas tree (conveniently 8 lights), with off as zero and on as one, and convert using digital ascii you get  http://www.hookchristmaspuzzle2016.org/3tre.html. Try clicking and enjoying the taunts at the bottom of the screen. Eventually, more cards come up. We have not solved this set of triplets, but there are not 26 unique characters, but rather 27. Hmm. (Oh, later update...after all the funny taunts, a card code appears. It reads "What does it take to convince you?")

7. The Christmas tree has a number of "Easter eggs", so play around a little. The morse code you get with clicking the yellow ball reads, 

Important announcement: when the yellow ball is clicked children start running around looking for their Morse code books and wondering if there is anything at all useful in the message.  There isn't.  Unless you need confirmation that GGG is J.

8. At some point, Michael had mercy on me with my cookie fixation, and brought out a "snack": fortune cookies! And guess what? They had specialty clues! They are:

  A. "Would anyone care for a cup of Diamond Ace Spade Queen?"

  B. "Hear or attend: this real hanger tied it into stones sent of an en."

  C. "Heart Ace plus Spade King equals Heart King plus Spade Ace."

  D. "Red cards can be exchanged for two black ones."

  E. "It is the ten of diamonds."

Using "Fortunecookie" as the playfair code under the star, we get, "How fortunate that you have a good cookie vocabulary. Too bad you do not speak fluent spade three diamond eight spade four spade eight." Aha! The last stands for "cards"...meaning spade three = 'c', diamond eight = 'ar', spade four = 'd', spade eight = 's'. Jeremy is working on that one now. Update for the decoding: "This code really takes the trick. Having the key makes it seem quite slick. Strings in cards for the Hook Puzzle Team, almost familiar yet an entirely new scheme. That's what was wanted for solvers so vaunted. Will they brute force it and try one by one every letter? Perhaps some good fortune would really be better. Now where did I hide my stash of big locks? I just need to close and seal the next box." The card code under the tree reads, "Lost? Try directions.html" (the site is http://www.hookchristmaspuzzle2016.org/directions.html). The card codes on the physical puzzle read "Starting over is to be expected when the directions take you around the square repeatedly so hang in there."

9. The shifting Caesar cipher under the red ornament reads, "Tumble, tumble, shatter! The red ball falls of the tree, splintering into a million pieces as it hits the floor. Among the shards is a note that reads, "rxow ra ovsqwak gk pbbd ocwj ibsdj. Tpry ry abt w fczv." The gibberish at the end can be substituted to read "Made in Germany by Hook Glas works. This is not a clue."

10. On Directions, the first word is, "Directions." The arrows showing orientation imply that the letters are in a box. Using these bits of information, we were slowly able to create the grid. Translated, the message reads: "Take one bag of twenty-six letters and empty it into a five-by-five grid. I and J are thin enough to put in one box. Mix thoroughly. Pretend your grid is tiled infinitely so there are no edges for each letter in your message, randomly pick one of the its eight neighboring letters. Supply that one and the direction the reader must move to arrive at the real character. Be sure your reader has a copy of the grid or is smart enough to figure it out. 
If you really wanted a hint and not directions, click here instead." The 'here' hyperlink leads you to: "Hint: Invisible Ink"

11. Invisible ink...that must mean white-on-white font, right? Jeremy clicked on the blue ball on the Christmas tree, and highlighted under the "site under construction, come back later" you can see more directions to be solved! After Florence decoded the message, we got, "Hi, there! Did you expect that I would be written in lemon juice? Anyway, I'm just here to tell you that sometimes you have to look at the world through the window of steganography." Gah! (Update: after some searching through code and so on, we discovered a photo shrunk down teeny tiny and placed in the elf picture. A snippet of music played as well: Police's "Message in a Bottle". Ashley identified the snippet via an app she knew about, and could tell us exactly the vantage point of the photo...off we traipsed, and, dangling from a string on the railings, sure enough!

 A bottle! Inside is a message with cards and directions...to be decoded). The card clue says, "Enjoying the scenery? It is nice that you took the time to pick up a random bottle" and the directions clue says "All creatures great and small appreciate your caring for the environment." Time to run to the videos to check out James Herriot! OH NO! We have a new deck of cards!!!!!!!!! The jokers and "extra" cards have tiny holes punched in them. Braille? Computer punch cards? No idea. "It's very interesting," declares Jeremy. Meanwhile, the main cards have handwritten numbers and letters on them...like 57 or O, for example.

12. We figured out the sweatshirt letters. Stacked in order (Ashley, Eleanor, James, Matthew, Florence, and Jeremy), we read, "Merry Christmas Eleanor Matthew Florence Ashley Jeremy James with love and warmth Daddy." We're presuming that the order of the stacking will come in handy for the numbers; maybe a combination lock?

13. Okay, time for the real cards to get their own section. James arranged them in order on the floor for decoding, but we were missing a bunch of numbers. Meanwhile, Jeremy decided the punch cards were just a repetition of the binary ascii system. Decoded, they read "Feeling a half-deck short? Time for some more college prep!" 

Yes, opening the SAT review book, we discover that Michael has carved out a hole for the card box. We have additional cards! James is working on that now. Okay, so read out, it becomes "Cards often started things entirely tender but this is only another string to render when you are real stuck times three a boxed hint for that puzzle is in the kitchen oven in B. Hand it or send it to Florence to test or risk having a token distressed. Merry Xmas." We found a key-operated cash box with no key! The back of the wrapping paper has a hand-written color-coded message on the back that Ashley and Florence are working on right now. Also, the remainder cards with the handwritten numbers and letters, when put in order using the applied letters, read "This is just a red herring."

14. The code on the back of the wrapper (substitution): "Well, technically the hint was where I said it was. I didn't say it would be easy to read that hint. Daddy"

Exhaustedly yours,

Alexandra