Skald's Puzzles

This puzzle can theoretically be done in squares.io! (Other ipuz readers won't support adding bars.) Thanks to juff and The Rackenfracker for ipuz help. But with all that, you should do this puzzle in sheets anyway because in sheets you can color cells, and colors are pretty. You can also verify the alphabetically earlier answer here and the alphabetically later one here.

This year's holiday event puzzle, written for duckmedic. No knowledge about duckmedic is necessary to solve. Minor knowledge about ducks and medics may be helpful. You can verify the final answer here.

What could it be?

New features include dates and hints.

Huh?

So one day juff was like, do you want to make a puzzle with me and Saroota and I was like sure. And then we made this. Why are you still reading this? Go click on their links and solve their puzzles.

For those who need more gimmicks and more extractions.

This puzzle is unreasonably large. But unlike Meeting Friends, this one is unreasonably large on purpose.

My previous puzzles weren't rotationally symmetric, so I made extra sure this one was. For the optimal experience, you should solve it on a non-winter day, but if it happens to be a winter day, that's fine too.

Another puzzle I made for a holiday event.

My first cryptic! It was written for a holiday event. I was wondering how big to make it and thought... "this seems fine". (Narrator: "It wasn't fine").