The Bullshit Continues…

On the very first day of our 12 Days of Holiday Bullshit, we said that there was a hard puzzle hidden across the 12 days of gifts. It’s definitely proven to be a hard puzzle, because no person or group has solved it yet and claimed the prize. To help you solve the puzzle, we told you–in a fairly easy to crack cipher–not to throw away anything we sent you.

We’ve provided a few hints to help steer solvers in the right directly. So far we’ve confirmed that:

There really is a puzzle.

The puzzle requires multiple steps, each one made tractable by the previous steps.

HolidayBullshit.com is not part of the puzzle.

Arbitrary anagrams are not part of the puzzle.

Intermediate clue phrases are not meant to obfuscate what to try next; the puzzle isn’t designed to lead you down blind alleys.

Some of the physical objects you’ve been sent are important.

You might make progress by laying out everything you’ve been sent and looking at it all at once.

(Some of these hints were accidentally deleted from our Tumblr. Sorry about that. They still stand.)

So far, a group of online solvers has figured out the first step of the puzzle, which involved a set of fake postal timestamps on the backs of the envelopes. The message they found has lead to many ideas for what to do next that are tantalizingly close to right, but not quite there. We’d like solvers to make some progress and see more of the puzzle, so we’d like to give them a little nudge in the right direction:

Not everything we sent you is part of the puzzle. Some of what we sent you is there for practical or aesthetic reasons or just to make the gifts funnier. Some of what you think is information is just there to make things look nicer. Likewise, making the gifts funny was more important to us than making the puzzle easy–but we warned you it was hard! The information in the timestamps gives you a message only if you put it in the right order. Don’t ignore either. Laying out everything we’ve sent you might help because it’s not possible to solve the next step with any one item individually. After all, the puzzle was designed to take advantage of items across the 12 Days of Holiday Bullshit.

Ok. Happy hunting!