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.
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