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I'm thinking along the lines 4-11 rather than one word of 15 letters.

James: it's 1 word alright, but with a hyphen after the first4 letters. And it means the very opposite of "Christmas spirit", which by chance was my first guess --- complretely wrong, but would also have been 9,6 and not 15, in keeping with the other misleading letter totals given here!

PS I think a hyphenated word still counts as one word.

Yep GK, I have it.

Just started to look at this and I think that I am giving up! Got 16A straight away from wordplay, but fail to see how this applies in 10A (if I have it right that is), and why given the loosest of "instructions" are all clues undefined, and word-count not given? I can't see any theme in the few that I've got so far. Very disappointing crossword in my humble opinion. Good luck to all!

Nearly all done bar the top right hand side.

I have answers for all apart from 3 down, but I'm not at all happy with what I have. My answer for 4 down (which was among the first I solved) doesn't really follow the instructions at all, with the relevant element in the wrong place.

Very disappointing.

CMK: have to agree re 4D. makes no sense.

cmk - I think the thematic element of 3 dn is the same as that of 17d. They've now published the correct word-lengths - after some of us have submitted!

Agreed on 3D.

21A: Is there a word with I*M*M?

Can someone explain the wordplay at 9A please?

Add me to the list of the disappointed!

Is anything really served by omitting definitions and real word counts, except to mystify solvers in a way which is easy for the compiler but gives no sense of fun and satisfaction to the solver?

Ditto the 'theme' of 16A. It gets a big, fat "So what?" from me too. For a while I didn't solve 16A, though I was on the right lines - but I was trying to think of a 15-letter word until I saw the hints here - and I wondered if 'displayed in all other solutions' meant that the others contained only letters from that 15-letter word. It looked likely for a while, and led me down a few wrong paths.

I've only just started this - well, apart from taking a quick look in the early hours because I remembered (a) that it was Genius day and (b) that we bought a cheapo tablet some months ago, and I might be able to actually see the crossword and fill it in - nope, not on Android/Chrome I can't. Then at lunchtime I tried on my computer but one printer ink had run out, and the printer wouldn't play nicely even though I didn't need that cartridge for the crossword. So I had to go to the library and print it - hence the late start. (And the Java version never worked, though it failed in a different way on each of the 3 devices - well done, Grauniad, love you but that's a bit pants.)

Anyway... I'm a little over halfway done and I'm giving up because Crucible has managed to remove a big part of the fun of doing a crossword. It's one-up from guessing words at random, but I want a bit more than that, especially from the Genius. I want to feel the setter put as much effort in as I am, if not a lot more. I'm feeling a bit short-changed.

And I'm not even feeling grumpy. Really.