Christmas word scramble

Rules

• Each line shows the letters of one Christmas word in the wrong order.
• Type or write the word that uses all of the letters, each as many times as shown.
• A line turns green on screen as soon as its word is right. Check marks the lines that are wrong.
• The answers all come from the same Christmas list as the word search on this site.

Playing the Christmas scramble at a party

A scramble is the quickest Christmas game to set up: print one sheet per guest or per team, hand out pencils and start a timer. Everybody at the party gets the same numbered round, so it is fair, and Print with solution gives the host the answers on a separate page. For a larger group, read the jumbled letters aloud one line at a time and take the first correct shout.

The short round uses words of four to six letters, the kind a young reader knows by sight in December: santa, elves, holly, bells, carol, angel, wreath, tinsel. The long round has words of seven letters and more, among them reindeer, stocking, ornament, yuletide and peppermint. Mixed ages can share one table if the children take the short sheet and the adults the long one.

When a word will not come, think about what Christmas words look like. Many end in a pattern you can pull out first: the ING of stocking, pudding and wrapping, the ER of december, the LE of candle, bauble and mistletoe. Set the ending aside and the letters left over are few enough to try in your head. Double letters help too. Three Es and two Rs among eight letters can only be reindeer.

Tips for hosts and solvers

• Solve the words you see at once and come back to the rest; the hard ones are easier when they are the only lines left.
• On screen, Reveal one adds the next correct letter to the line you are on.
• Every numbered round picks a different set of words, so you can print three rounds for three teams from the same page.
• Letters are shown in capitals. On screen you can type in lower case.
• For a classroom, pair the scramble with the Christmas word search: the same words appear in both, so one prepares the other.

How these puzzles are made and checked

Each scrambled word is compared letter by letter with its answer, must differ from it, and the answer must be the only word in our own list that uses exactly those letters.

The puzzle of the day is chosen by the date on your device: puzzle 1 was the puzzle for 1 January 2026, and the number goes up by one each day. Short words: 366 puzzles, so the same puzzle comes round again after 366 days. Long words: 366 puzzles, so the same puzzle comes round again after 366 days. Every number stays open in the archive control above the grid. More detail is on the page how the puzzles are made and checked.