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Storybook Forest

Pied Piper

by Mark Gottlieb
Answer: NEW YEARS DAY

Solvers must first identify the 33 songs from the snippets provided. Only the titles matter. The songs are:


1. All I Want for Christmas Is You - Mariah Carey
2. All I Want Is Everything – soundtrack to the Nickelodeon TV series Victorious, featuring Victoria Justice
3. All I Want Is You – U2
4. All I Want to Do – Sugarland
5. Baby Come to Me – Patti Austin & James Ingram
6. Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) – Darlene Love
7. Do What You Do – Jermaine Jackson
8. Do You Feel What I Feel? - JLS
9. (Everything I Do) I Do It for You – Bryan Adams
10. I Feel for You – Chaka Khan
11. I Know What I Know – Paul Simon
12. I Love You Love Me Love – Gary Glitter
13. I Want to Know What Love Is – Foreigner
14. I Want You to Know – Zedd (feat. Selena Gomez)
15. It Is What It Is - Kacey Musgraves
16. Let Me Love You Tonight – Pure Prairie League
17. Let Me Take You Home Tonight – Boston
18. Let You Love Me – Rita Ora
19. Love Is Everything – George Strait
20. Love Love Love – Of Monsters and Men
21. Please Come for Me - Korn
22. Please Come Home for Christmas – Eagles
23. Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want – The Smiths
24. Take Me Home Tonight – Eddie Money
25. Take Take Take – The White Stripes
26. Tonight, Tonight, Tonight – Genesis
27. What Do You Want – Jerrod Niemann
28. When It Hurts – Avant
29. When Love Hurts – JoJo
30. When You Get to Know Me – from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Stephen Ward
31. You Know I Love You – The Pigeon Detectives
32. You Know What to Do – The Beatles
33. You Want Me – Tom Zanetti

Collectively, these song titles use only 26 unique words. The provided word search grid uses 26 letters. It’s a substitution code; each word is encoded as a single letter. The encoding is:

ALL Y
BABY N
CHRISTMAS F
COME L
DO V
EVERYTHING O
FEEL C
FOR S
GET I
HOME U
HURTS P
I Z
IS G
IT E
KNOW A
LET W
LOVE J
ME R
PLEASE H
TAKE B
TO K
TONIGHT Q
WANT X
WHAT D
WHEN M
YOU T

The most obvious break-in point to the grid is with “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want,” though there are other solving paths. The decoded and solved word search is:

The unused letters decode to the message: HURTS ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS WHAT. The band Hurts has a song “All I Want for Christmas Is New Year’s Day,” so the answer is NEW YEAR’S DAY (which is itself a U2 song).