Christmas is Coming

I was blissfully unaware of the proximity of the festive season until I was asked by a former colleague to produce a Christmas-themed crossword. Once I had recovered – with the assistance of several plain chocolate digestives – from the initial shock (both of the impending festivities and of someone actually asking me to set a puzzle), this gave me a chance to experiment with the ‘theme list’ capabilities of Crossword Compiler. These proved to be quite powerful but completely dependent on the quality of the theme list itself, and the Christmas one provided with CC is fairly basic and decidedly US-oriented, so I put together my own list which meant that CC and I were able to produce a filled 51-word grid where more than half of the entries had a direct thematic connection.

I can see myself needing the list again so I have loaded a copy into the Clinical Data area – it can be found here. I would welcome any additional contributions (there must be lots of possibilities that I have missed), and I will be happy to provide on request a plain text version of the table which could be loaded into Crossword Compiler (and edited, should you not like some of my inclusions!).