Title: Gift Wrapping
Prompt: The meta answer is a character associated with the holiday season.
Answer: The Grinch
Explanation: The three longest across entries don’t appear to have much in common, but they do all have the same trigram, BOW, appearing in them. 69A TOP, clued as [Surface of a gift that the bow goes on], indicates that this might be relevant, and indeed it is: take the letters appearing underneath each instance of BOW and you get THE, GRI, and NCH, i.e., THE GRINCH, the contest answer.
There were 89 correct answers, which is a new record for this contest, and in an ACL first, there were 0 incorrect submissions! Several people noted (correctly) that fill was a bit iffy in places (a consequence of stacking BOW on top of each of THE, GRI, and NCH, none of which yield particularly friendly letter combinations), but apparently this did not hold anybody back, and we are ending the year on a great note!
Congratulations to this month’s randomly chosen winner: Lydia Roth of Columbus, OH! The prize this month is a copy of a thematically apt novel embossed with FROM THE LIBRARY OF ARIADNE. This month I’m taking inspiration from another holiday character who appears in this puzzle: Scrooge mentioned in the clues at 25A. So this month the prize is Jacob T. Marley by R. William Bennett. Congratulations, Lydia!
You can read Ben Chenoweth’s blog post about this month’s contest over at Crossword Fiend, where you can also leave a comment and rate the puzzle.
Dubious Honors
This month’s Tick-Tock Award, which is awarded to the solver whose submission I received first, goes to Tom W., whose answer came in at 9:52 AM EST on December 1. The White Rabbit Award, which is awarded to the solver whose submission I received last, goes to contest winner Lydia R., whose answer came in at 10:40 PM EST on December 5. I have no actual prizes to hand out to these solvers (well, unless you count the fact that Lydia already won the contest prize this month), they just get the satisfaction of BOOKending this month’s contest. Well done!
Can you beat their times next month??
Thank you to everyone who submitted an answer to this month’s contest and also to anyone who submitted an answer to any ACL contest this year. It’s been a great first year for this project, and I’m excited to come back in 2026 with more contest crossword fun and, most importantly, with more guest constructors! An extra special thank you to anyone who donated to ACL this year – you are a big part of keeping this project going, and I am very grateful for your support. If you have not yet donated and are interested in contributing financially to this project so that I can promise fair constructor payments to future guest constructors, please head over to the Support ACL link to find information about how to contribute.
Thanks everyone for a great year of crosswords! See you in January!
Ex libris Ariadne
Ariadne's Crossword Library 