Times 24,105 – ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas…

Author   sotiraPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
17:40 .. ‘Twas a parson’s nose of a puzzle. I need help explaining 15a.

Here’s a seasonal diversion (improvements welcome):

 On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me
Twelve solved m-murders drumming,
Eleven pied birds piping,
Ten peers in the cricket ground a-leaping,
Nine ideals,
Eight second amid wayward girls a-milking,
Seven quill pens? a-swimming,
Six layers of gold a-laying,
Five No.1 bands?,
Four women with a vocation,
Three poules,
Two birds scrambling re lost duvet,
And a partridge in a pear tree.		  

 		  

Across
1  BLOW-UP – Presumably a double definition, but ‘Begin to develop’ seems questionable.
5  D(I,S,C)OVER – ‘Show up’ for ‘discover’?
9  R(O,SARI)UM
10 S(A)CRUM
11 PHONETIC – (pitch one)*
13 THO,RACES – axes and aces are both okay.
15 TEES – er, I don’t know why. TricklE EndS would do it, but I can’t parse the clue. Help anyone? Thank you to jackkt for explaining that there are ‘tees’ (the letter ‘T’) at the start of ‘trickle’ and the ends of ‘great’ and ‘torrent’.
17 C,LOD – C + (old)*
20 G,ENTRY
21 P(ARAM)OUR – Despite his brilliance in philology, the autodidact Eugene Aram‘s main contribution to history will likely be his unwitting confirmation of the old aphorism about the man who has himself for a lawyer. Hanged in 1759.
22 THOMAS – Philip Edward Thomas, poet and protege of Robert Frost, who wrote famously of the above in his The Dream of Eugene Aram. Also here, Thomas Hood, poet, and Thomas Arnold, er, not a poet, was he? I thought the poet was the son Matthew.
23 oRnETpROFIT – Clever.
24 NUG,A,TORY
25 S,UNDRY – I like ‘undry’ for wet.

DOWN
3 WHAT(NOT)S – a whatnot being a “a stand with shelves for bric-a-brac”.
5 DEMOCRATIC PARTY – (try, cope, dramatic)*
6 CHA,BLIS – source of endless bliss for a chap.
7 VERY WELL – I put ‘very good’ in at first before realising the clue demanded the adverb.
14 EUPHRATES – (superheat)*
15 TUNGS,TEN – call the homophone police?
16 EVEN,SO,NG – delightful clue
17 C(RUM,H)ORN – Renaissance instrument. The name comes from the German krum (meaning ‘sounds terrible’).
18 OCCU(PIE)R

But I heard him exclaim, ‘ere he drove out of sight,
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!”

Merry Christmas, one and all.

15 comments on “Times 24,105 – ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas…”

    1. Thanks, jackkt. Now added to the blog. I could have stared at the clue till New Year without seeing it.
  2. From being ridiculously friendly, this turned around and bit back. I too drowned in the Tees.

    Festive best wishes to all from New Zealand. Thank you for you convivial company.

  3. Another of those puzzles of two halves for me. The LH almost solved itself apart from 24a and I got 14d,23a and the 17s on the RH side quite early on, but then I ground to a halt and eventually came here with 10a and 8d unsolved. I saw the possibility of PARAMOUR at 21 and eventually wrote it in but couldn’t justify it as I never heard of Aram. I looked twice at barmaid = servant at 19d.
  4. I shared all Sotira’s queries, didn’t really like “undry”, thought 5dn was cleverly topical, and had never heard of Aram.

    As a lawyer I had only heard the saying the other way round, that a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client.

    Regrettably I cannot match (let alone improve on) Sotira’s wit, and would not presume to suggest any changes to her offering.

    From Sydney, best wishes to all for Christmas and the New Year.

  5. Parson’s nose indeed. I agree with everything Sotira says and would like Jack also question barmaid = servant. Not any of the barmaids I’ve known, for sure. I only solved TEES by getting all the intersecting clues. I then thought surely not as the awful truth dawned.

    Liked the diversion Sotira. Happy Christmas everybody.

  6. A puzzle of two halves for me also. Made a rapid start, didn’t think too hard about TEES and PARAMOUR, but didn’t understand them, then ground to a halt, slowly picking up again and finishing in 45 minutes, almost twice the time I took to solve yesterday’s. I don’t think it was twice as hard, just my brain on go-slow. Even then, I got one wrong. Not having heard of the plural THORACES, I entered THORAXES and forgot to go back and check wordplay again.
  7. I must be ready for Christmas as I haven’t completed a single one so far this week. This time I wrote PARVENUE in at 21a which made CRUMHORN impossible. Ho hum. I’m also ashamed to say I had to google The Twelve Days Of Christmas to get 9! I thoroughly agree with all the moans and whinges about all the clues, especially the homphone. It’s nice to get Christmas off with a bit of “bah, humbug”.
    A Merry Christmas to one and all.
    1. It’s possible we’re being harsh on 15d, if one allows that the ‘spoken’ only governs the ‘tungs-/toungues’ bit, with a regular bit of semantic wordplay – ‘ten/10’ – to follow. But I think one should be harsh to conteract all this syrupy good will stuff. Bah, humbug! and a merry Christmas to you, too, penguin.
  8. And greetings from sodden wet Houston where at least there’s wireless.

    I put THOMAS in for 22 but was secretly hoping that the answer would turn out to be TROJAN (didn’t know Arnold, so maybe he was from Troy, and hood would be a nice definition), but I turned out best guessing on the side of the other sort of safety.

    ROASRIUM and SUNDRY from wordplay, didn’t understand TEES, but it was clued American style so didn’t need to.

  9. 10.25 – I liked this puzzle, and wasn’t bothered by the various quibble possibilities. Maybe Dylan T is a bit more obvious than Frost’s protegé.

    Here’s an old crumhorn hit

    1. I’m sure you’re right about Dylan T. I didn’t think of that at the time, and the connection to the infamous Aram made the other Thomas a serendipitous misreading, if that’s what it was.
  10. About 40 minutes. I didn’t recognize Aram, I thought the reference was to Dylan Thomas, and I also thought 3D was a pretty lame, badly hidden clue. I’m not being Scrooge-like though, because I thought SUNDRY, RETROFIT and TEES were pretty clever. All in all, an entertaining puzzle to send us off for the holiday. We really need a little Christmas this year, so thanks to Sotira for the song, and thanks to everyone else for all their help this year, holiday wishes to you all.
  11. As for jackkt, the LH side fell very quickly for me, with one or two absurdly easy clues – e.g. 2dn, which barely counts as a cryptic definition, I would have thought. But elsewhere some really tricky and clever clues, which took a lot of cracking. I can’t see anything wrong with 15dn, which, as sotira says, works perfectly well if “spoken” is taken to refer only to “languages”, a parsing justified by the comma.

    Season’s greetings to all.

    Michael H

    Michael H

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