Sunday Times Jumbo Cryptic No 5091 by David McLean — all unwrapped

This fruitcake is chock-full of seasonal nuttiness, with a good number of clues that wouldn’t work nearly as well at any other time, which makes it generally quite easy. The few unusual words and more difficult parsings really stood out.

Times Cryptic 28788 – Sat, 16 Dec 2023. In another century, and besides the wretch is dead!

At first glance I thought this was going to be hard. But, once I started, I fairly flew through it. There were two or three obvious answers, where I later had to search for details to explain the wordplay.