Hard Christmas Word Search: Fourteen Long Words in Every Direction

Fourteen long Christmas words, most of them nine letters or more: candlelight, celebration, chestnuts, cranberries, decorations, fruitcake, gingerbread, hot chocolate, ornaments, peppermint, snowflakes, sugarplum, wrapping paper and the yule log. Long words seem easier, but in a 15x15 grid they cross each other and share letters, and the eye keeps losing them.

The words go every way the grid allows. Six of them lie on diagonals, and several read backwards, so the puzzle rewards a slow, systematic search more than luck.

Hard Christmas Vocabulary: 14 Words to Find

Words run across, up and down, and diagonally; 5 of the 14 read backwards. The longest word is Wrapping Paper, with 13 letters.

Candlelight: The soft light of candles, as at the candlelight services held in many churches on Christmas Eve.
Celebration: A party or ceremony for a special occasion.
Chestnuts: Sweet nuts roasted over an open fire in winter, as in the first line of The Christmas Song, made famous by Nat King Cole.
Cranberries: Tart red berries grown in flooded bogs in North America, cooked into sauce or threaded on string as a garland for the tree.
Decorations: Everything put up to make a home look festive: lights, ornaments, wreaths, garlands and candles.
Fruitcake: A dense cake packed with dried fruit and nuts, often soaked in rum or brandy so that it keeps for weeks.
Gingerbread: A sweet, spiced cake or cookie flavored with ginger and molasses, baked into men and houses at Christmas.
Hot Chocolate: A warm drink of cocoa or melted chocolate with milk, often topped with marshmallows or whipped cream.
Ornaments: Decorations hung on the Christmas tree, from glass balls to handmade figures kept for years.
Peppermint: A strong, cool mint flavor, the taste of the classic red and white candy cane.
Snowflakes: Ice crystals that fall from clouds. Most have six arms, because of the hexagonal way water molecules freeze.
Sugarplum: A small round sweet of boiled sugar or dried fruit, remembered from the "visions of sugar-plums" in the 1823 poem A Visit from St. Nicholas and the Sugar Plum Fairy of The Nutcracker.
Wrapping Paper: Decorated paper for wrapping presents.
Yule Log: A large log burned in the hearth over Christmas, and the rolled chocolate cake decorated to look like one.

How to Solve the Hard Christmas Word Search

"Wrapping Paper", 13 letters, slopes down to the right, like "Sugarplum" and "Yule Log", the only word with a Y. "Chestnuts", "Cranberries" and "Gingerbread" lie on diagonals sloping up to the left, so they read backwards. "Candlelight", "Hot Chocolate" and "Snowflakes" run down; "Decorations" climbs up. "Peppermint" reads backwards along a row, and "Celebration", "Fruitcake" and "Ornaments" read across.

Christmas Puzzle Challenges for Teens and Adults

Print one copy per person and race: the first to find all fourteen picks the Christmas movie.
Try it without looking at the list, only knowing that every word is about Christmas.
Search one direction at a time, all the diagonals first, and see if it is faster than hunting word by word.