MAKING A FAST BUCK

MARY LOU: I originally contacted Jeff in November of last year about a reindeer themed Christmas puzzle with a dot to dot picture. We kicked many ideas back and forth. I mentioned the original eight reindeer as theme possibilities and Jeff suggested RUDOLPH THE RED NOSED REINDEER which breaks into 13/13. He went off in one direction with the eight reindeer and I came up with the attached grid. We submitted both ideas to Will and heard back favorably from Joel on both grids but the picture grid having the edge. We were given the go-ahead to proceed with the fill and cluing.

Jeff did the grid reconstruction. It was quite a challenge, given the 26 fixed points of the picture (Joel mentioned that it felt incomplete without the Z) as well as the theme entries, to work clean fill around. About two months and numerous emails later we got word that the puzzle was in the queue.

I'm very excited to have another Christmas puzzle as well as a Sunday grid in the NYT. Many thanks to Jeff, Will, Joel and Sam for assistance in bringing this puzzle to press. I hope you enjoyed your solving experience.

For years and years, Liz Gorski had been doing wonderful Xmas dot-to-dot Sunday puzzles for the NYT. It had been a while, so Mary Lou and I decided to try to carry on the tradition.

But what shape to make? We threw out a bunch of ideas, and the one that stuck was RUDOLPH prancing through the skies, with his RED nose lit up. Easy-peasy, right?

Um … no. We needed to flesh out the idea with some themers, and ML found a nice split of THE MOST FAMOUS / REINDEER OF ALL. Along with some other assorted RUDOLPH-related answers, it felt like the grid wouldn't be so bad to construct.

Wrong!

So very, very wrong.

Like, miserably wrong.

Grinch-level wrong.

Just testing out different arrangements of where to start the path took forever, as we kept having to adjust the position of every single circled letter. And then sometimes one felt like it might be amenable … except for some stupid little corner. I probably restarted the process 50 times before hitting on the current arrangement.

But it just got harder from there. The biggest problem was that it's really hard to make a 140-word Sunday puzzle, period, and it's much harder to do it when every region of your grid is constrained. Sure, we could shift around letters a little bit here and there, but then they'd get in the way of the themers, or they'd make RUDOLPH look like he was limping, etc.

I should have studied Liz's work more carefully — in most of her dot-to-dots, she did well to spread out her letters through the grid in such a way that they didn't interact with the themers, or she used much fewer than 26 dots.

Live and learn. Given how much frustration and sleeplessness it caused me, I doubt I'll ever make another dot-to-dot. (Unless it just has two dots. Anyone have ideas for a LINE theme?)

Happy holidays!

The Elizabeth Gorski year-end connect-the-dots puzzles is the greatest tradition in NYT crosswords. Liz is caught up in her own delightful weekly puzzles now, so Mary Lou and Jeff have taken up the tradition, at least for this year.

It seems like a good time for a Liz Gorski Year-End Visual Crossword Retrospective. Her year-end puzzles include:

• this clock counting in the New Year in 2000
• a year later, the ball dropped in Times Square
• a Christmas tree in 2003
• a non-visual countdown in 2006
• a dapper Snowman in 2007
• a martini glass toast in 2009.
• a tasty Gingerbread Man in 2011
• and a tree-top Angel in 2013

There's more write-on-the-grid creativity on our Visual Puzzles page.