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I hear you: Don't mess with the mammoth crossword
Letter from the Editor Who knew that a giant crossword puzzle could be such a source of anxiety?
Not the solving of it – the publishing of it.
For some years now, we’ve published a special mammoth crossword puzzle this time of the year, for people to work on during the holidays. It has become a quite popular Plain Dealer tradition, something that families tackle together.
Normally, we publish it the Sunday before Christmas. This year, though, Christmas is on a Friday, which was pretty far out from Sunday. We decided to run it this Sunday, the 27th, figuring most people have time off to solve it between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
Oops.
When the puzzle did not appear in last Sunday’s edition of The Plain Dealer, the email started rolling in, asking me what gives. I received so many inquiries that we ran a short piece online and in print Monday to say the puzzle is coming Sunday.
Some of you think we are quite daft. You wanted to tackle that puzzle on Christmas and the day after, and our publishing schedule deprives you of that ability.
OK. OK. OK. I hear you loud and clear. Next year, when Christmas is on a Saturday, we will make sure to publish the puzzle in advance.
For those subscribers you who simply could not wait and wanted to get started, we provided a .pdf of the puzzle online on Christmas day. You can download it and print it at home. It’s not the same seeing the grid on a sheet of printer paper, but people could get going on it and transfer their work to the big version when they receive the Sunday paper.
We hope you enjoy tackling this challenge. Monica Zurowski, a deputy editor at the Calgary Herald, has been designing the puzzle for 16 years and each year loads it with clues specific to happenings of the previous 12 months, milestone birthdays and major anniversaries, like this year’s centennial of Band Aids and the 10th anniversary of the iPad.
And the puzzle lives up to its description of mammoth. It has more than 200 clues and fills two pages in The Plain Dealer.
We are not publishing the solution Sunday. You can find that in the paper on Friday, and again next Sunday. I know that some crossword solvers prefer to have the solution run the same day, but we’re following tradition here. I checked so as not to run further afoul of your traditions. We generally publish the solution about a week later.
Back in 2009, one of our editors at The Plain Dealer graciously offered to email the solution to people visiting family in Cleveland who would not be around for the solution. If you’ve made it this far in this column about a mammoth crossword puzzle, I guess I owe you something. So,I’ll make the same offer. If you need the solution before it publishes on New Year’s Day, email me back and I’ll send it.
Have a good holiday.
Thanks,
Chris Quinn Editor and Vice President of Content
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