Drifting platform for polar wildlife / MON 12-19-22 / Part of a swimmer's sidestroke / Archer's arrow launcher / Built in lag time to allow bleeping during a live broadcast

Constructor: Jennifer Nutt

Relative difficulty: Medium (normal Monday)

THEME: GIFT (38D: Something that can be wrapped with the starts of 17-, 24-, 40-, 51- and 64-Across) — things you use to wrap gifts:

Theme answers:

• TAPE DELAY (17A: Built in lag time to allow bleeping during a live broadcast)
• SCISSORS KICK (24A: Part of a swimmer's sidestroke)
• BOX SEAT (40A: Good vantage point at an opera house or stadium)
• PAPER TRAINED (51A: Like a puppy who's learned where to "go") ("quotation marks?""really?")
• BOW STRING (64A: Archer's arrow launcher)

Word of the Day: ROLF (46A: Massage deeply) —

Rolfing (/ˈrɔːlfɪŋ, ˈrɒl-/) is a form of alternative medicine originally developed by Ida Rolf (1896–1979) as Structural Integration. Rolfing is marketed with unproven claims of various health benefits. It is based on Rolf's ideas about how the human body's "energy field" can benefit when aligned with the Earth's gravitational field.

Rolfing is typically delivered as a series of ten hands-on physical manipulation sessions sometimes called "the recipe". Practitioners combine superficial and deep manual therapy with movement prompts. The process is sometimes painful. The safety of Rolfing has not been confirmed.

The principles of Rolfing contradict established medical knowledge, and there is no good evidence Rolfing is effective for the treatment of any health condition. It is recognized as a pseudoscience and has been characterized as quackery. (wikipedia) 

This was pretty lackluster, as seasonal themes go. The concept is OK, but it's basically just a ho-hum first-words puzzle—an extremely well-established theme type. Nothing about the theme execution here is particularly striking or creative or memorable. It's dense, I'll give it that. And it has an extremely oddly positioned revealer, with GIFT jammed all the way over there to the left. The puzzle would've been improved at least slightly if the symmetrical answer (in this case, MALI) had also been part of the theme. You could've gone with XMAS / GIFT—I know we like to stay inclusive and not default to Christianity, that's fine, but from a strictly crossword standpoint, XMAS / GIFT beats plain old GIFT. Some people get offended by the abbr. XMAS, though, did you know this? I did *not* know this ... until I had a reader or two yelling at me a few years back when I used the abbr. casually in one of my write-ups and they took it as, I dunno, some kind of blasphemy or anti-Christian statement. Bizarre. As for the theme answers themselves, they're OK. The two more ... unusual ones were also the ones I got tripped up on, for very different reasons. I thought the swim kick was a SCISSOR (no final "S") KICK, so once I got SCISSOR, and even after I got SCISSOR S-, I didn't know what I could possibly be dealing with. I had to jump up into that NE corner and work it from the inside out. The other themer that gave me trouble was PAPER TRAINED, which ... er ... I'm kind of grimacing right now, trying to think of how to express my various distastes here. First, I like to think about urination and defecation as little as possible when I'm solving a crossword, so there's that, but whatever, I can deal. Bigger issue for me was having no idea PAPER TRAINED was really a thing you did. Why are you doing this? I've HOUSE TRAINED (the One True Answer For This Clue) a puppy and not once ever did we train her to go (as opposed to "go") on paper, yikes. We went straight to training her to go outside, no half measures. Maybe apartment dwellers teach their dogs to go indoors? I'm not familiar with this. I have (vaguely) heard of paper training, but ... oof, I considered POTTY before PAPER. Needed most of the PAPER crosses to get it. Luckily, those were easily obtained.