New York Times, Saturday, December 25, 2021

So nice to be back with my second puzzle — and on Christmas of all days to boot! I guess with a little bit of imagination, the grid is maybe sort of Christmas tree-shaped. Personally, though, I mostly see an old telephone.

It's not intended to look like anything in particular, though; the wacky grid design is purely incidental. It started simply as an attempt to build a triple stack of 15s. Once I had that in place and was trying to figure out where to go from there, I soon realized that I could build that little arch around the central crossing entries and use left-right symmetry rather than rotational. That's nice since it gave me the freedom to play around with the placement of black squares in the upper half of the grid until the very end of the construction process, rather than having a fixed layout that I needed to adhere to.

I'm especially pleased that the one layout that did end up working for the upper part is the one that perfectly matches the big stairstep chunks of black squares in the lower half, which I think certainly added a bit of elegance to the puzzle.

Hope everyone's having a wonderful Christmas. It truly makes me happy that something I made gets to be a part of it for so many people.

Grid art! I squinted as hard, and the spirit of St. Nick allowed me a Christmas tree for Dec. 25^th. It's not nearly as tree-like as other grid art, unfortunately. Jim Horne mentioned that it looked more like an old-timey phone, not unlike the one that old man Potter used in his plot against George Bailey, eh, Jim (and Johan) Scrooge?!

I kid. My weekly conversations with Jim have been highlights of this pandemic era. We had a lot to discuss today, both of us enjoying SHORTS WEATHER as a great entry, but why feature it in a wintertime puzzle?

GOD FORBID and SLEEVELESS DRESS both stood out as well, the latter doing an impressive job of both being an evocative entry and a constructor-friendly one, placed wisely at the bottom row. Those Ss and Es are so flexible.

Both of us did feel like old men, saying OMG to OH EM GEE. Jim was going to mark that as "bogus" for our word list, but apparently, it's a thing.

We debated if OOH I'M SCARED felt like an asset or not, too. I started by saying it needs a SO between I'M and SCARED, at which point Jim burst into laughter over my ridiculousness.

I had heard of ELENA DELLE DONNE, definitely crossworthy with her two WNBA MVP titles. I sweated each crossing, though, questioning whether or not DEVIATOR was an actual word (it is in the dictionary) and trying to recall if the physics unit was DYNES or DYNOS.

Merry SHORTS WEATHER for those who celebrate!