My Santa got me a nice Thrustmaster (heh heh, giggity) joystick off of my Amazon wishlist, but also noted that another gift would be arriving later that I would "Need help opening."

Lo and behold, a few days later I received an inspired multi-part puzzle gift that was incredible!

In the box were three additional packages: A poster tube containing a large poster print of the popular PXL CON art (with strange clues and numbers written on the back), a CrypText Tube puzzle that was locked with a 5 letter password, and a FRIGGING SAFE locked with an unknown length passcode. (At this point I'm giddy with anticipation. I love puzzles!)

It started with my santa messaging me a link to the following reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/gameformidashand/comments/3v300c/lets_play_a_game/

The first step was to gain access to the Cryptex Puzzle tube, which was locked with a 5 letter word. As you can see in the picture, I cheekily tried my own first name, but of course that wasn't correct. ;P

The clue on the back of the PXL CON map turned out to be the main lead for this part of the puzzle. \u\JigsawSanta 's comment history had several comments with truncated URLs that I plugged into the PXL CON legend website. (Matching the context of the URL in the comments of the subreddit clue) Taking the first letter of each character, I wound up with the letters MRAUU.

The only 5 letter word I could spell with those was AURUM, the Latin word for gold, a call out to my namesake! :D Sure enough, AURUM was the lock word for the puzzle tube. Success! One item accessed, one to go! (I was rewarded for this victory with a package of Haribo brand gummy bears. yummy!)

The other items in this container were a page of vertical words and a tiny handheld UV LED. Having seen one or two old spy movies, I knew exactly what needed to happen with the UV light. ;)

Going over all the other items with the light, I discovered a (rather creepy looking) message on the back of the poster, on top of the strange number sequence! I now had the DIGITS to the safecode, but not the order... hmmmm.... 1 5 6 6 6 7 9 9

Looking over the rest of the clues on my subreddit, it was pretty obvious that I needed to cut one of the strips off the sheet and wrap it around a small cylinder to spell a word. (this can been seen in action within the Running Man video clue) However, I couldn't seem to get it to work, apparently not having an object of the right radius to make the letters line up. I tried cutting and offsetting all the strips by a few letters but still couldn't seem to figure out out. :(

Giving up on that clue for the time being, I went on to the other two: Both of which were rather.... perplexing.

The first one was a short clip of a dance competition and the second was a single question: "I wonder.... how much does it weigh?"

How much does what weigh? The safe, maybe? So I dutifully took the safe over to the bathroom scale and determined it weighed almost exactly 9 pounds. Where did that get me? Well, nowhere really....

This part had me stumped for quite a while! Bouncing back and forth between the clues for the next hour or so, I finally had an epiphany! The name of the youtube video was "Gold Intl. Foxtrot UMass 2015." Gold! Just like the first clue! Hmmm... How much does gold weigh?!

Googling "gold mass" got me the atomic weight of gold: 196.96657 u! Exactly the same digits as were revealed on the back of the poster!

Punched that in to the safe and voila! Success!

Inside were numerous cool items: A collection of HP Lovecraft stories, a Cthulhu Christmas ornament, a Fallout 4 collectible figure, two UV reactive invisible ink pens, and a $20 Steam gift card!

So, after all this, to my santa: Thank you, so much! This was easily the best gift I've ever received through an exchange, and I've been doing the Christmas and Arbitrary Day exchanges since they started.

PS: For those of you wondering, after touching base with my santa, I discovered the word-strip spelled "ATOMIC", but I didn't manage to find it before my brain made the leap on its own.