It’s Christmas Day, fellow puzzlers, and it’s tradition around here to celebrate the holidays with a free puzzle to solve!
This year is no exception, as I’ve cooked up something festive and fun for you.
Our friends at Penny/Dell Puzzles have a puzzle called Wordfinder, and when I thought of it, I immediately had the idea to do a holiday-themed version of it.
Merry Christmas, friends. May the holidays be kind to you.
The answers to the clues are in the diagram in their corresponding rows across and down, but the letters are rearranged and mixed together. Each letter is used only once, so be sure to cross it out when you have used it. All the letters will be used. Solve ACROSS and DOWN together to determine the correct letter where there is a choice. The first letter of each word is shown outside the diagram and next to each clue. The first answer, TINSEL, has been filled in as an example.
One government agency in England celebrates Christmas a little bit differently than most.
The GCHQ — or Government Communications Headquarters — provides security and intelligence services for the British government. Back when they were known as GC&CS — Government Code and Cypher School — they were responsible for funding Bletchley Park and its successes cracking the German “Enigma” code during World War II.
And now, they provide one of the coolest and puzzliest challenges of the year, designed for solvers aged eleven to eighteen to test their skills, hoping to inspire the next generation of puzzle solvers.
At GCHQ, we love creating puzzles and breaking codes. That’s why every year we create the GCHQ Christmas Challenge, a series of fiendish brainteasers and puzzles, designed by our very own team of codebreakers. It encourages children aged 11-18 to think laterally and work as a team, as well as showcasing some of the skills they might need to become a spy.
The puzzles are not designed to be solved alone, and each student will bring something different to the challenge. At GCHQ, we believe the right mix of minds enables us to solve seemingly impossible problems.
I’ve always been impressed with what festive puzzly efforts GCHQ brings each year, and I can’t wait to see what the 2025 edition has in store for solvers.
So, fellow puzzlers, do you accept this year’s Christmas Challenge? Let us know in the comments section below!
Now, there are a few caveats here. Obviously this is not a traditional crossword grid. It has no symmetry (either radial or axial), and it is littered with one- and two-letter entries, which are not allowed. There is also the small matter of the bottom left corner being completely disconnected from the rest of the grid.
Here is the empty grid with MERRY and CHRISTMAS preset (without the pencil blocking several squares):
Now, to stick to the reddit request, I left the grid mostly as is.
However, I could not in good conscience have part of the grid disconnected from the rest, so I removed a single black square in order to connect the grid fully.
There we go.
Oh. And one additional challenge: I only allotted myself ten minutes to fill the grid.
As usual in crossword construction, I tried to avoid abbreviations and variant spellings as much as possible (even with the two-letter entries), and keep the vocabulary as accessible as possible.
The only real challenge in this grid was finding a seven-letter word starting with R that aligned nicely with CHRISTMAS as the neighboring word.
In keeping with the holiday theme, I chose RAISINS, as the California Raisins and their long-lost classic Christmas special came to mind.
From that point, it was a pretty quick job filling in the rest of the grid.
There are more plurals than I’d prefer, and DYNAST is by far the most difficult entry in terms of vocabulary, but otherwise, I’m pleased with my nine minutes and thirteen seconds’ worth of work.
What do you think?
I might come back to this one and see if I could clean it up more. Eliminate all the plurals, or maybe put themed words for all the border words along the edge. Something to really challenge me.
A few years ago, I posted a holiday puzzle that had been floating around the Internet for years. It was a list of Christmas songs and carols whose titles had been reworded, and it was up to the reader to identify the actual titles.
It was a popular post, but something about the list always bothered me. There were 21 reworded titles, which didn’t strike me as very Christmassy at all. I mean, why not 12? Or 24? Or, heck, 25?
So, I did something about it.
I added 10 new reworded titles to the list, bringing the total to 31, one for every day in December. Let’s see how many of you can crack all 31 titles, shall we? Enjoy!
1.) Move hitherward the entire assembly of those who are loyal in their belief.
2.) Listen, the celestial messengers produce harmonious sounds.
3.) Proceed forth declaring upon a specific geological alpine formation.
4.) Nocturnal timespan of unbroken quietness.
5.) Embellish the interior passageways.
6.) An emotion excited by the acquisition or expectation of good given to the terrestial sphere.
7.) Twelve o’clock on a clement night witnessed its arrival.
8.) The Christmas preceding all others.
9.) Small municipality in Judea southeast of Jerusalem.
10.) In a distant location the existence of an improvised unit of newborn children’s slumber furnishings.
11.) Tintinnabulation of vacillating pendulums in inverted, metallic, resonant cups.
12.) The first person nominative plural of a triumvirate of far eastern heads of state.
13.) Geographic state of fantasy during the season of Mother Nature’s dormancy.
14.) In awe of the nocturnal timespan characterized by religiosity.
15.) Natal celebration devoid of color, rather albino, as an hallucinatory phenomenon for me.
16.) Expectation of arrival to populated areas by mythical, masculine perennial gift-giver.
17.) Obese personification fabricated of compressed mounds of frozen minute crystals.
18.) Tranquility upon the terrestial sphere.
19.) Omnipotent supreme being who elicits respite to ecstatic distinguished males.
20.) Diminutive masculine master of skin-covered percussionistic cylinders.
21.) Jovial Yuletide desired for the second person singular or plural by us.
22.) Allow winter precipitation in the form of atmospheric water vapor in crystalline form to descend.
23.) A first-person observer witnessed a female progenitor engaging in osculation with a hirsute nocturnal intruder.
24.) Your continued presence remains the sole Yuletide request of the speaker in question.
25.) Permanent domicile during multiple specific celebratory periods.
26.) Diminutive person regarded as holy or virtuous known by the informal moniker shared by two former Russian tsars.
27.) More than a passing resemblance to an annual winter festival is emerging.
28.) Are you registering the same auditory phenomenon I am currently experiencing?
29.) Overhead at the summit of the suburban residence.
30.) Attractive or otherwise visually pleasing wood pulp product.
31.) Parasitic European shrub accompanied by a plant with prickly green leaves and baccate qualities.
How many did you unravel, fellow puzzlers? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you!
Every year, one of the puzzliest challenges many solvers will encounter all year descends upon the world, as the GCHQ issue their Christmas card.
The GCHQ — or Government Communications Headquarters — provides security and intelligence services for the British government. Back when they were known as GC&CS — Government Code and Cypher School — they were responsible for funding Bletchley Park and its successes cracking the German “Enigma” code during World War II.
This year’s Christmas card was directed toward solvers with a secondary school education (essentially solvers age 11 and up), and was less complicated than offerings in previous years, but still offered an engaging challenge.
Clue number one is an easy one, as you simply read the first letter of each word in the message. Your solution is CHRISTMAS.
Clue number two is a simple 4×4 across-and-down grid where 1-Across and 1-Down are the same word, 2-Across and 2-Down are the same word, and so on. The completed grid reads:
T H I S H O O T I O W A S T A G
And the letters in THIS are highlighted in the grid, so the solution is THIS.
Clue number three is a complete-the-sequence puzzle where the names of the Hogwarts houses from Harry Potter are listed, but each house in the sequence has more letters missing from the beginning and end of the word. Slytherin is the missing house, and with three letters missing from the beginning and end of the word, your solution is THE.
Clue number four is a Blackout! or Minesweeper-style puzzle where you deduce the location of bombs in the grid according to numbers in the neighboring squares. Once you’re marked off each of the bombs, the remaining spaces form letters and spell out a word. Your solution is SAFE.
Clue number five is a mnemonic device, and solvers must puzzle out what chain of related words is represented by the device. In this case, the major taxonomic ranks that are used to organize related living things are represented, and the word Kindly points toward the second word in the taxonomic ranks, so your solution is Kingdom.
Clue number six has three overlapping circles, each with letters inside, and you have to figure out not only what the words are, but what missing six-letter word would sit in the middle of this Venn diagram.
I found this to be the hardest puzzle in the card by far, as I tried and failed in numerous attempts to anagram the letters into recognizable words. Finally, I decoded the shortest word — LEEDS — only because I remembered that this is a British organization and I have friends who live in Leeds.
Leeds led me to unraveling the other two answers — MANCHESTER and NEWCASTLE — and my meager knowledge of European football provided the missing six-letter word. The solution is UNITED.
Clue number seven is a simple cryptogram, and is quickly decoded to read “This is the 7th question: people born between nineteen forty-six and nineteen sixty-four are commonly known as baby what?”
The solution appears to be BOOMERS, but there is an additional instruction to follow after decoding the message, and you must encode the answer. Following the same letter-substitution rule, BOOMERS becomes KEEPING, and that is your solution.
Now each word must be placed in order on the tree for your message to properly read out.
The word BABY in clue 7 points toward the stroller icon, so our message begins with KEEPING.
The lightning bolt icon refers to Harry Potter, so the word THE from clue 3 goes next.
The soccer ball icon points to clue 6, so the word UNITED continues the message.
The word KINGDOM from clue 5 aligns with the crown icon, so that’s our fourth word.
The lock icon is most closely associated with SAFE from clue 4, so that’s next.
At first, I thought the image of the Stag was a Harry Potter reference, but I then realized that STAG was one of the answers in clue 2’s grid, so this was the place for THIS.
Finally, the present is the perfect spot for clue 1’s solution, CHRISTMAS.
And the message is revealed, celebrating the mission of the GCHQ itself: Keeping the United Kingdom Safe This Christmas.
Did you unravel this festive puzzly challenge, fellow PuzzleNationers? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.
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