Brains vs. Brawn

As many of you know, William has a long standing "special" gift exchange with his brother Chris. I have the "special" in quotes because basically, it means finding the most unusual and/or difficult way to open the present for Christmas.

I call this year "Brains vs. Brawn" and the photos below will illustrate both of these camps.

BRAINS
After William's "snotty" gift last year, he decided that he would go to the opposite extreme this year and give Chris the following challenge: The Rubik's Cube.

As you can see, this is not-your-average Rubik's cube. There are several letters on each square and on every face of the cube.

I thought that it was pretty difficult to follow all of the letters across each face but that wasn't tough enough for William. He then scrambled it all up and gave it to Chris to figure out. William was kind enough to leave the package instructions for Chris, but even then, it stil took him awhile

MEANWHILE- this other part was occurring simultaneously

BRAWN

Chris REALLY wanted to make William work for it this year- from start to finish- and Chris made great use of the resources at his job at the lumber shop. As you can see, besides wrapping up the gift nicely, he also wrapped it in shrink wrap. Under the shrink wrap was this wooden box.

Looks fairly innocent right? WRONG. Not only are there several layers of wood that are nailed together in multiple places, but there is also an extra bonus of a layer of GLUE holding it all together. (FYI- all of the following occurred with the presence of my father-in-law, ensuring that we would not have a special Christmas Eve trip to the emergency room).

William first tried the crow bar with zero impact. He then went for the chisel and hammer, also to no real impact.

Thus, he decided to pull out the power hand saw.

And finally with this, he had some progress- slow, but progress none the less. Chris had warned William at the beginning that there was something "fragile" inside but William had just thought that it was a gift card. So, while the power saw did help him to get inside to the gift, he actually sawed off the top part of his gift.

It's kind of hard to tell but you can see that he cut right through the box of his all time favorite cereal- Reese's Puffs.

While he was able to access them, we did not eat them because we did not want the added "fiber" from the woody shavings that also made it inside the box.

WINNER??

Ultimately, it was a DRAW. Both brothers finished up at the same time- one expended forth more mental energy and the other one physical energy. This being said, I have NO IDEA what they will do to try and top this for next year . . . .