This puzzle is part of the Puzzling Stack Exchange Advent Calendar 2024. The accepted answer to this question will be awarded a bounty worth 100 reputation.
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What's inside these Christmas presents? There's also a final word that fits.
These presents each contain a
GIFT
How do I know that?
When I saw the patterns of pixels in each pair of presents, I immediately thought that taking the difference of each pair would likely provide some new information. And I was right!
The red presents
reveal text written in Aurebesh:
Translating the text reveals the word GAMES. Note that we have to ignore the extra square inside the G; we'll get back to this later.
The green presents
reveal a birds on a wire cipher:
deciphering the birds gives us the word PLUSHIES, once again with an extra square over one of the birds.
The purple presents
reveal text written in Braille:
That lone dot on the far right looks like it might be an A, but if we instead assume it's the extra square we've seen twice before, we can instead smell PERFUME.
The blue presents
reveal a pigpen cipher:
If we once again ignore that extra dot that's in the wrong place, this deciphers to CLOTHES.
But wait!
Why did we ignore the extra squares? Each of them seemed to be marking a letter in one of the presents. Specifically, the G in games, the I in plushies, the F in perfume, and the T in clothes. Reading those out gives us our final thematic answer, GIFT!
