Enigmatic Variations No. 1056: Winter Festival by Kcit

My first thoughts on seeing this puzzle were a) not another ‘split clue and decide where to put the answers’, like my last blog, EV1052, and b) that the split grid device was similar to the recent Inquisitor 1264…so a couple of hints of ‘déja vu’?… The preamble says that ‘most’ clues are double clues run together – with the answers to go in either the left or the right half of the grid, and that ‘some’ clues are not double, in which case one entry is unclued and has to be thematically deduced.

After a concentrated 45 mins work on this, I had 15 entries – some from double clues, some single – but no obvious indication of how/where they would fit – left or right. Eventually, I had 1, 2 and 3 down solved, which gave me G/H, R/O and O/G as the letters in positions 1,2,3 and 7,8,9 of 1 Across. First mistake – ‘Winter festival? – the letters H O and G? – so 1A must start ‘HOGMANAY…’ bit late, as that is New Year rather than end of Jan, but in they went.

After a few efforts at fitting other entries around this, and also trying to find four more letters to go with Hogmanay… ‘s Eve?…Morn?… I sheepishly reached for the eraser and started again. What if HOG was the start of the second half of 1A? Then the start must be GRO. GRO___HOG___ – of course – GROUNDHOG DAY – which coincided closely or exactly with the puzzle’s publication date.

The answers I had now tumbled nicely into place, and the crossing letters helped with the others – which left the unclued thematic treatments, which I eventually tracked down as five repeated entries (think of the film, Groundhog Day, where everything repeats itself, day after day) – SNIPE, MARID, PAELLA, PROFILE, MEDIAN – and two names for similar celebrations of the same date in other cultures – CANDLEMAS and IMBOLC – which was my last entry.

 I found this an enjoyable challenge, and a clever application of a topical thematic device – nowhere near as gruelling as the Inquisitor 1267 variation on the same theme – which I turned to soon after completing this puzzle.

The combined clues were not overly hard to separate – and it was fairly clear which ones were single clues, just from the relative lengths. I’ll go out on a limb and say this was towards the easier end of the EV clueing difficulty spectrum, and maybe a medium on the thematic difficulty scale.

(I just have one quibble: with the use of ‘most’ and ‘some’ in the preamble. In EV 1055, the preamble referred to ‘most’ of the clues having a thematic characteristic – which turned out to be 35 out of 38 clues – whereas here 11 out of 18 clues were double clues – and 7 of 18 were single/unclued/thematic. Maybe ‘the majority of’, or ‘just over half’ would have been a more accurate description?)

In the parsing below, I have given the full clue, with a ‘/’ to indicate the split – then the broken down clue, and an indication of whether it is for the left [I] or right [II] half of the grid…