Special, Saturday 24 Dec 2016, Balderdash

TWO ANSWERS per commenter till 6 PM (Annotations compulsory)
Please provide your answers in one comment.            

                

                                             A SPECTRAL SYMBOL FOR X'MAS                                     

As against the two dimensions, which are familiar to crossword solvers, i.e.  ‘Across’ and ‘Down’, this puzzle is 3 dimensional. The third dimension is ‘Away’. The cubical grid is visualised as five layers (each layer being a 5x5 square) of the cube in the grid below. The directions Across, Down and Away are marked alongside the grid for your reference. All answers are 5 letters long, but one of them is made up of two words. Solve like you would solve a regular puzzle – you have crossings from an additional direction as you go along. It might make things easier if you fill in the Across and Away answers first, and then the Down clues.

After solving. if you look around the middle of cube, you may find some connections to the festive season, as indicated in the title. Though at the heart of it, you will find a sweet nothing. These may be mentioned in the blog after the entire puzzle has been solved here.

 

Across
1	Ace loses first place resulting in strain
4	Joint bowel movement?
7	Run around a fortune-teller’s aid
10	To some extent, bosun cleans relative
13	G-man who treats spirit
14	Sir, returning key terminals can be dangerous
15	Flyer one buried in piece of land
18	Mason arrived carrying sound equipment
19	Look around a zoo initially, and take possession by force
Down
1	Provide online joke
2	Do better with some luck after old age
3	Time to let out river
4	Slightly moves borders
5	Sportsman brought into this world around first of June
6	Watt consumed right liquid, for example
7	Badly frustrated after loss of well-organised trade in areas under control
8	Initially, respected Indian sadhu having intellect
9	Meth manufactured around end of July for Herb
Away
1	First lady takes books to convention, perhaps
2	Queen embraces Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. That’s hot stuff!
3	Idiot gobbles egg, for example
10	Old city(German)’s presser
11	Go over religious symbol
12	Portal’s bad net/line
15	Violently opposes, leaving Post Office, to get money
16	Nail broken when travelling around American island
17	Number of Magi’s dimensions found in this puzzle

This format of the puzzle is not supported by AcrossLite. Hence, a printable version is available at
Balderdash9.

Enjoy

Solution Grid

Two Themed entries CROSS and GHOST run across the centre of the central layer, forming the symbol of a cross.  At the absolute centre of the cube is a O or 0 signifying 'Shunya' or nothing.

It is a pangram