The December MMMM challenged solvers to find a hit from the ’70s. The puzzle’s title, “Can You Make the Time?,” is essential to figuring out the meta. The word TIME (with one letter changed) appears in eight different places in the grid:

TIMOR
STIPE
DON’T HATE ME
PRIMES
OPTIMA
STALACTITE
TOMEI
TIRES

Reading left to right in the grid, the changed letters used to “make the time” spell O-P-E-R-A-T-O-R, pointing to Jim Croce’s famous 1972 song Operator, technically Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels), this month’s meta answer.

Meta Song:

I recorded this at Power Station at BerkleeNYC.  Hope you like my version!

Selected Solver Comments:

Matt Gaffney   Hidden in plain sight!

rvkal   You can keep the dime . . .Looking forward to your cover of this beloved oldie!

Jerry Miccolis   Jim Croce, from my home town of Upper Darby, PA!

benchen71   Looking forward to being involved in MMMM from the beginning of next year!

Alternative Music Clues:

DIS and Redhead64 suggest cluing STREAK as [Ray Stevens ’70s novelty song, with “The”].

pbfrommn suggests cluing SWELL as [“Thou ___” (jazz standard by Rodgers and Hart)].

Redhead64 and Ant also suggest cluing TURBO as [Judas Priest’s first album to make use of synthesizers].

Groaners:

Zoltar   Thank you for your time, ah, you’ve been so much more than kind.

Jwaan   The letters in my grid are old and faded, but I think they are a pangram.

Laurabrarian   But isn’t that the way they say MMMM goes?

Jeremy Smith   Or maybe it should be TIME IN A BOTTLE?

HunterX   You Don’t Mess Around With Metas! If I could Make Time, I’d put it In A Bottle. Then I’d be famous enough to say, “I Got A Name!”

Mattyx   I dialed it in at the end!

A total of 183 solvers found their way to the correct answer this month. The average rating for the puzzle was 4.25 stars out of 5, and the average difficulty rating was 2.85, on the easier side (for those who found the answer, at least). This month’s randomly chosen winner of an MMMM coffee mug is John Munn from Kalamazoo, MI. Thanks to Matt Gaffney for blogging the puzzle at Crossword Fiend, where you can rate the puzzle (thanks!) and/or leave a comment.

Mega-Meta:

This month, an additional 21 people found the answer to the mega-meta, making a total of 51 for the year so far. Perhaps they were helped a little bit by one of this puzzle’s clues? There’s still time to solve the mega-meta before the mega-meta reveal puzzle, which will be published on December 21. If you want to qualify for the Grand Prize drawing, you need to solve the mega-meta before then (in addition to getting at least 8 of the 12 metas during the year correct). For easy reference, all of this year’s puzzles can be found here.

Thanks for playing and see you December 21!