2022 Northfield Winter Walk Ornament Hunt

First off, I'm honored that Tim asked me to write the clues for this hunt. I've participated in the Defeat of Jesse James Days Horseshoe hunt for years, and followed the Winter Walk hunt for almost as long. Far too often, the holiday season gets really busy to make it down to Northfield to hunt for it. This past fall, in Babcock Park, the morning the horseshoe was found, Tim asked me where the Horseshoe Hunt falls on the quality chart of all the hunts I track across the Twin Cities, the state, and even the country. The Northfield hunts, in my opinion, easily fall in the top three, not because of the prizes (which are nothing to sneeze at), but because of the care, passion, knowledge, and research that Tim puts into them. His passion came out as he watched us hunters search for the four mini horseshoes he’d scattered through the park. 

Apart from finding the horseshoe (which has thus far eluded me), my personal first challenge each year is to figure out what story Tim is trying to tell. There is always a story, and a well thought out story at that. The Winter Walk Ornament Hunt has been no different. OK it might be a little different in that it has frequently been a song, but a story of sorts nonetheless.

With that rich history of telling a story, I could hardly do any less with this year’s Ornament hunt. As I am insufficiently right-brained to write something from scratch, I went through my favorite Christmas stories, where Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol floats to the top of the list. It is a wonderful story of the redemption and transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge. Coincidentally, it takes place over four nights, or at least that's how Jacob Marley leads us to believe. The problem I had was that there are really five clues worth of material to use to work with; the ghosts of Jacob Marley, Christmases Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet To Come make up the first four staves of the story, and of course Christmas Day as Scrooge wakes up a transformed man. Yes it was used as source material a few years ago but there is enough to work with that one could write clues for several years worth of hunts just off of this timeless tale.

That said, as much as A Christmas Carol is a story of redemption, and has a happy ending, it is a rather dark story. I had visions of writing a dozen verses worth of clues to spread over the course of four days. Once the decision was made to use Way Park as the hiding spot, and how it was donated to the city, I couldn't keep many of those dark undertones and maintain the respect commanded by such charity, thus many of those ideas were scrapped. They would have been just a lot of unnecessary fluff anyway, and once I found the tree in Way Park, so much of that cruft became unnecessary. I didn’t actually need those sadder points for the story to be complete, and get you to the ornament. As a die hard hunter myself, I have a habit of trying to read something into each and every word and punctuation mark, and even every letter in the clue. Certainly not everyone is as engaged as I am; I’d imagine quite the opposite is true, and it is those not as in to this “sport” for whom I wrote these clues. 

I hope that Dickens would approve of the slight license I took with his story to lead you to the 2022 Winter Walk Ornament. Happy Holidays! Thank you for hunting; I hope you enjoyed it!