This year for the kids around the house I wanted to do something fun and educational. I made a RaspberryPi powered santa sighting alerter. The SantaTracker.py script follows @noradsanta on twitter and flashes an LED everytime that @noradsanta tweets about a sighting. I also integrated a little morse code into the project to flash christmas messages that the kids had to decode. You can make a game out of it and give out secret santa gifts for the one who decodes the most messages.
You will need to go to twitter and start up a developer account. Twitter Developers
I used tweepy to hand the authentication and filtering of twitter. Tweepy read the docs