Christmas Songs Crossword Puzzle

A Christmas songs crossword puzzle is a great holiday twist on a favorite pastime.

A quick search on Google can yield several resources for crossword puzzles that solely deal with holiday music:

• Newsword offers a PDF of Christmas songs in crossword puzzle format.
• Funtrivia's crossword puzzle deals exclusively with Christmas carols.
• Powerhouse Radio crossword puzzle #27 is chock-full of Yuletide songs.

Of course, the holiday season is more than simply Christmas. Other cultures celebrate during this same time of year. Holidays such as Chanukah (Jewish), Ramadan (Islamic), and Solstice (Wiccan) are also celebrated in midwinter. Crossword puzzles featuring themes from these holidays may prove more challenging and at the same time help broaden your cultural perspective. Kwanzaa is a celebration of African-American heritage that is also observed during this time and has many themes and words that lend themselves to crossword puzzles.

While finding a puzzle on the Internet is certainly the easiest way to obtain a Christmas songs crossword puzzle, a more fun and personal way to get it is to create your own. You then control the theme and content. Some example themes might be:

• Instrumental Christmas Songs
• TV Christmas Special Music
• Christmas Movie Themes
• Famous Christmas Singers

Once you've selected your theme, the next step is to come up with a list of words that will populate your puzzle. The easiest part is going to be the titles of the songs themselves, but make sure that you use the full title – or else plan on specifying in the clue which part of the title you are referring to. Related terms should also be in the list – artists, instruments, stories, authors, or events. For example, a numerical clue could be "Charity pop song in the '80's" with the answer being "We Are the World".

Next comes the clues. The knowledge and education of the puzzle's target audience needs to be taken into consideration), but part of the joy of a crossword puzzle lies in figuring out the clues. The act of filling in the words should be the icing on the cake, not the objective itself. A good example of making clues tricky enough to be mini-puzzles in and of themselves is the New York Times, which will often include hidden meaning word puzzles as part of their clue list. The easiest example of this technique would be the clue "ABCDEFGHIJKMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" to signify the word "Noel" ("no L").

With the selection of words in place, getting a piece of graph paper will enable you to begin writing in the words in crossword fashion. It is recommended that you use a pencil at first, so that you can erase and move words around as you see how the letters may cross and fit together. Remember that the numbering of words should come last; this gives you a chance to make any last-minute changes to your puzzle to make it fit more easily into the traditional square grid.

An easier method of generating crossword puzzles is at the Crossword Weaver page. You simply type in the words and clues into the textbox, separated by a "/", and title your puzzle. When you click "Create Puzzle" it will give you several choices, such as paying a small fee to have a print quality version of the puzzle. However, it also provides for free a web version of the puzzle, complete with automatic numbering and a very neat listing of the clues for both up and down words.

Whatever the method, a holiday song crossword puzzle makes a great addition to any celebratory season.