Bob’s 2012 Christmas Puzzle Card

This year’s card contains two unrelated puzzles that are printed on business cards. The puzzles aren’t related—one uses one side of the cards, the other uses the other side.

Construction
The Twisty Reindeer Paths Puzzle
The Elves’ Thesaurus Puzzle

Construction

Front of cards (black and white)
Back of cards

Print the front and back images of the cards (links to the images are above) on the front and back of one sheet of pre-perforated business card stock. Business card stock is available at your local office supply store. The front side is in color but a black and white version is available if you don't have a color printer or if you don't want to use up half a cartridge of magenta ink. Separate the ten cards along the pre-perforated lines.

Alternatively, you can print the two sides on separate sheets of paper or card stock and glue them together back to back. Then use scissors or an exacto knife to cut the cards, using the tick marks along the edges as a guide.

The Twisty Reindeer Paths Puzzle

In this puzzle your goal is to connect pairs of reindeer in the right order to pull Santa’s sleigh.

Two cards contain reindeer names and one end or the other of green paths. The other eight cards have parts of green paths, with some crossing. Placing one name card on each end and several other cards in between, you can form four paths that connect the right reindeer to each other.

For example, the figure below shows some paths formed using two cards. Unfortunately, the only connection that’s correct is Prancer-Vixen. The other three connections, Donner-Dancer, Dasher-Cupid, and Comet-Blitzen, are wrong.

Don’t know which pairs of reindeer are right? Well, it’s all spelled out in that famous Christmas poem. And it’s also often sung at beginning of that song about Rudolph. It’s also shown here.

The puzzle has many solutions and can be solved using any number of cards.

Solutions (don't look if you don't want to see them!)

The Elves’ Thesaurus Puzzle

Last year Santa made a big mistake. At the end of his ride he discovered that the presents he’d intended to give to his elves had accidentally been packed into his bag and he’d given them all to children. Thinking fast, and not wanting to dissappoint the elves, he quickly gift wrapped the first thing he found—his thesaurus.

To Santa’s surprise, the elves were quite pleased with the gift and over the past year have taken advantage of every opportunity to improve their vocabulary. When the holiday season came around, they began singing their renditions of old songs with new lyrics.

The ten cards contain the first two lines from five of these “improved” songs. Your job is to match the two cards for each song and to figure out the original song it represents.

Solution (don't look if you don't want to see it!)