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1999 Independent Christmas Jumbo

Jumbo puzzles take an awful lot of setting, and an awful lot of typing up for a website.  To save time, I’m putting up the grids on the site, with PDFs for the clues scanned in from my own records.  There’s also a PDF of the grid alone. This reveals how long in advance Christmas puzzles are done – a bit like TV specials, no doubt.

It’s possible that there may have been a few edits of the clues between my copy and final publication.  But you will get all the clues – when I looked at the published copy, I noticed that the last half of both the last Across and last Down clue had been omitted.  I don’t recall a hoo-hah at the time, but it may have dissipated over the ensuing period of dissipation.

This particular Jumbo comes from Christmas Eve 1999.  The reverse of the puzzle has a lot of quotes from celebrities about what they will be doing to welcome in the new millennium.  The mathematically-correct answer of: ‘Oh, I don’t know, it’s still a year off’ is not among them.  Surprisingly many of the selected celebrities are still known today – good long-term trend-spotting from the 1999 Independent reporters.  My thanks to the Independent for permission to reproduce the puzzle here.

Jumbo2puz

Xmasjumbogrid

Across clues

Down clues

Solution

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About me

This is the website of Paul Henderson, who sets crosswords for The Independent (London) under the pseudonyms Phi, for the Daily Telegraph (London) under the pseudonym Kcit, and anonymously for The Times (London) amongst many other outlets. For a more detailed biography see the About Me page.

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