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He counted the days until Christmas every morning, lunch and evening. He made a huge wishlist of presents; a RC car, flashy shoes and much more. He couldn't wait until the day that he could show off his shoes to others. But when boxing day finally came, he got nothing but a Christmas ball...

He wondered and wondered why he didn't get any presents. He took a close look at the Christmas ball and saw something amazing; there were small engravings on it. He figured out it must be some kind of secret message, but he gave up trying to find out.

Can you figure out the secret message from santa, and why the kid didn't get any real presents?

The front-side of the Christmas ball

The answer must explain how the sentence was achieved. Hints will be dropped regularly until the question is answered

Hints:

Hint 1:

The sentence has to be composed by figuring out multiple patterns and creating words out of them, after which you add the blocks of characters together to form a sentence.

Hint 2:

The dots, Christmas trees, and colors are all individual patterns. The Christmas trees represent binary in some way.

Hint 3:

The location of the dots represent one letter. If there are two dots in one hexagon, then there are two occurences of that letter.

Hint 4:

Spaces are also 'encoded' in each pattern.

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    $\begingroup$ What's a Christmas ball? Are those hexagons meant to be wrapped around a 3D shape in some way, or will it be enough just to consider the 2D image you've provided? $\endgroup$
    – Rand al'Thor
    Commented Dec 19, 2016 at 12:09
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    $\begingroup$ @randal'thor it will be enough just to consider the 2D image. $\endgroup$
    – Thomas Wagenaar
    Commented Dec 19, 2016 at 12:11
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    $\begingroup$ A Christmas tessellation. $\endgroup$
    – LeppyR64
    Commented Dec 19, 2016 at 12:13
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    $\begingroup$ Boxing day might be confusing to some as it's Dec 26th :P $\endgroup$
    – dcfyj
    Commented Dec 19, 2016 at 13:17
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    $\begingroup$ @Techidiot Maybe #1 and the first first sentence of #2, yeah. The other ones shouldn't IMO. (#4 is disputable) $\endgroup$
    – user14478
    Commented Dec 19, 2016 at 20:01

2 Answers 2

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Finishing off @RottersSlave's work, the colours spell:

CHRISTMAS IS MORE TH

if we let:

Blue=0, Green=1, Red=2 and take the trifid cipher with 222=(space)

So we get:

CHRISTMAS IS MORE TH/AN JUST/ PRESENTS with the A?? dot being a space.

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  • $\begingroup$ The answer is correct. I used a = BBB, b = BBG enz. (Not really familiar with a trifid cipher, but I guess I used it :). $\endgroup$
    – Thomas Wagenaar
    Commented Dec 20, 2016 at 7:54
  • $\begingroup$ @ThomasW That's just the name $\endgroup$
    – boboquack
    Commented Dec 20, 2016 at 8:06
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Partial Answer

Dots

The dots spell out

[space]PRESENTS

because

Each cell represents a letter. The dots represent how many times this particular letter appears in the anagram (EENPRSST and [space]). The square labeled 'A??' indicates the space.

Hexagon

Trees

The trees spell out

AN JUST

because

just interpret every empty cell as a 0, every cell with a tree as a 1. Then split the string into parts of 8 and convert to ASCII. (01100001 01101110 00100000 01101010 01110101 01110011 01110100)

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  • $\begingroup$ You're on the right track ;). Stay tuned for hints! $\endgroup$
    – Thomas Wagenaar
    Commented Dec 19, 2016 at 19:29
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    $\begingroup$ @ThomasW Cool puzzle! But you might want to wait a little longer before posting hints, not everyone has seen the puzzle / all the hints so far yet. $\endgroup$
    – RottersSlave
    Commented Dec 19, 2016 at 19:30

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