Need help with today's NYT strand? Today's theme, Are you listening? - is a slightly seasonal puzzle.

Below are the clues and answers for Strands #294. Please read on if you need a little help, as we will start with a few clues and connect them to the complete answer to Strands #294.

WARNING: There are spoilers for Strands #294.

The official theme for NYT Strands #294 is... [are you listening?

And here's an unofficial tip from me: “Christmas Radio”

If you're still in the dark, here are some useful words that will give you valuable hint tokens:

Still struggling? Spangram gives you a hint on conjunctions. Today's word starts with W and ends with D.

It's WINTERWONDERLAND.

Now, what's the answer to today's strand?

Drumroll, please.

... Spangram was WINTERWONDERLAND.

Strand #294

“Are you listening?”

🔵

💡🔵

Hello Strand fans! I found today's puzzle quite tricky, even though I knew what it meant. I know the song “Winter Wonderland” of course, but it's kind of background music for me, and I've never paid attention to the lyrics before.

So it took some trial and error to get an answer, but I found the word BELLS and had a good enough start before I knew that the “Are you listening?” theme was related to this song. At this point, I thought it might be a festival of sorts that I could hear, but after a fruitless search, I used a clue.

As a result, I found SNOW and knew that this was a song about something else, since I could not hear the sound of snow; when I saw the word “wonder” I remembered the song's existence and the spangram of WINTERWONDERLAND was connected.

Now I had to rack my brain to find other lyrics. GLISTENNING OF SNOW? let's find out! To complete that side, I found it at the bottom.

I was close as the spangram took up most of the board! When I found SLEIGH in the upper left corner, I remembered the chorus: we are walking through a winter wonderland! I pieced it together and completed the puzzle with only one clue.

Reading later than this? You can find yesterday's article on Strand's solution to game #293 here.