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This puzzle is part of the Puzzling Stack Exchange Advent Calendar 2024. The accepted answer to this question will be awarded a bounty worth 50 reputation.

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There's a great new Advent calendar on the market which you can customise to conceal a loved one's name behind the door for December 25. However, the one I ordered for my friend Declan is missing that door entirely, and in fact there are 24 other seemingly unrelated words behind the other doors.

I called their customer service hotline and learned that I'd accidentally ordered the 'puzzling version' of their product, which doesn't quite work like that - but (they said) I could still technically work out exactly where that 25th door would have slotted in had I ordered the standard one.

I'm so confused - this is a puzzle?! If that's the case... Where should 'Declan' go?

GCHQ 'Where' puzzle dressed up as an Advent calendar

Instructions (adapted from The GCHQ Puzzle Book (2016) and the introductory puzzle here on Puzzling Stack Exchange): The words in the following list can be partitioned into equal-sized sets depending on words associated with them; each set has its own word association method. This list is arranged so that these associated words are in alphabetical order. One of these sets is missing a member, so you have to work out where in the list the associated word fits alphabetically, and hence where the word itself should appear in the list. The list should be read from left to right and top to bottom and is only written in columns for convenience. (See the introductory puzzle for a more detailed explanation and an example.)

The question to answer is:

Where does 'Declan' fit in the following list?
Kane Bale Gromit Answer
Gnasher Honor Canada Hunter
Land Hand Coward Sand
Paper Robbins Wright Baby
Night Bells Ride Wolfsnake
Rats Trumpeter Listen Nixon

In the first instance, please hold off posting partial answers unless you think you have found at least half of the correct word associations (although if you make it that far, why not push to complete the whole puzzle!). Thank you, and enjoy!

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1 Answer 1

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He fits...

right at the beginning

The associated words for each box are (in order)

(CANDLE) CAROL CHRISTIAN COMET DANCER DASHER DONNER GOOSE HOLLY LORD MAID NOEL PIPER PRETTY RIBBONS ROBIN SANTA SILENT SILVER SLEIGH SNOWFLAKE STAR SWAN TINSEL VIXEN - does anyone know how to spoilerify tables?

The categories being:

Anagrams of tree decorations DECLAN/CANDLE, ROBBINS/RIBBONS, WOLFSNAKE/SNOWFLAKE, RATS/STAR, LISTEN/TINSEL

Actors with Christmassy first names (CAROL) KANE, (CHRISTIAN) BALE, (HOLLY) HUNTER, (NOEL) COWARD, (ROBIN) WRIGHT

Rhymes for Santa's reindeer GROMIT/COMET, ANSWER/DANCER, GNASHER/DASHER, HONOR/DONNER, NIXON/VIXEN

Prefixes for 12 days of Christmas presents CANADA GOOSE, LANDLORD, HANDMAID, SANDPIPER, TRUMPETER SWAN

Second words of two-word Christmas songs PRETTY PAPER, SANTA BABY, SILENT NIGHT, SILVER BELLS, SLEIGH RIDE

The KANE-BALE, GROMIT-GNASHER and LAND-HAND-SAND usage deserves an extra tip of the hat.

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  • $\begingroup$ All looking great! (Though you're missing your SILVER in the big list...) Pretty sure there is no way to put table mark-up in a spoiler, unfortunately, so a list is fine (TBH a list is the spirit of the question anyway - the table is only for presentation purposes). Oh, and yes all 3 of the 'usages' you mention at the end were by deliberate design - glad you noticed them :) (I'm just a little sad that 'Sand' and 'Paper' ended up on different lines when I formatted it all!) $\endgroup$
    – Stiv
    Commented Dec 4 at 11:49
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    $\begingroup$ Ooops. SILVER now added. $\endgroup$
    – Daniel S
    Commented Dec 4 at 12:52

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