Cabinet resignee of 1988 / SAT 12-30-23 / Pair of hand drums, in Indian music / Letter of completion, in brief / Part of a turntablist's headgear for short / Dad on "Black-ish" / They work in meters / Relative of a slot canyon / Drogo Jason Momoa's character on "Game of Thrones" / Across a wide expanse of rural land / Coat named for a former Irish province

Constructor: Simeon Seigel

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: PARTY (63A: Event suggested by this puzzle's circled squares, read clockwise from the top) — circled (and unchecked, i.e. uncrossed) squares spell out CONFETTI ... that's ... it? 

Word of the Day:"The ERL-King" (50D: Goethe's "The ___-King") —

[The Erlking, Albert Sterner, ca. 1910]

"Erlkönig" is a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It depicts the death of a child assailed by a supernatural being, the Erlking, a king of the fairies. It was originally written by Goethe as part of a 1782 Singspiel, Die Fischerin.

"Erlkönig" has been called Goethe's "most famous ballad". The poem has been set to music by several composers, most notably by Franz Schubert. // An anxious young boy is being carried at night by his father on horseback. To where is not spelled out; German Hof has a rather broad meaning of "yard", "courtyard", "farm", or (royal) "court". The opening line tells that the time is late and that it is windy.

As the poem unfolds, the son claims to see and hear the "Erlkönig" (Erl-King). His father claims to not see or hear the creature, and he attempts to comfort his son, asserting natural explanations for what the child sees – a wisp of fog, rustling leaves, shimmering willows.

The Erl-King attempts to lure the child into joining him, promising amusement, rich clothes, and the attentions of his daughters. Finally, the Erl-King declares that he will take the child by force. The boy shrieks that he has been attacked, spurring the father to ride faster to the Hof. Upon reaching the destination, the child is already dead. [HappyHolidays!] (wikipedia)

You took my hard Saturday puzzle away for this? It's not even New Year's Eve yet. If you're gonna take away my hard Saturday puzzle, there better be good reason, and New Year's Eve Eve isn't it. Further, I don't really get it. Hard to think of a revealer more anticlimactic than PARTY [insert lone, sad, half-hearted party maker sound here]. Just ... PARTY? Are you or are you not a New Year's Eve-themed puzzle? Do the circled squares represent the earth orbiting the sun? Do they form the shape of a clock dial, or the famed ball that drops at midnight in Times Square? Because I know they Sure As Hell do not represent the CONFETTI that they spell out. CONFETTI does not fall in a perfect circle. There is nothing about those circles that evokes CONFETTI beyond the letters they contain. My best guess is that the black squares (!?!) represent the confetti. There are no contiguous black squares, so they kinda look like individual pieces of ... well, CONFETTI? Maybe? But then why doesn't the revealer say that: "... suggested by the black square pattern in this grid"? You see, I'm just guessing at this point. There are imaginative and unusual elements of this puzzle, particularly the unchecked squares that actually Do end up being checked by the broader theme (for newer solvers: one of the "rules" of crosswords is that all squares have to be involved in an Across and a Down, so you have two ways of getting at it—this puzzle takes away the cross, but gives it back to you, in a way by having those uncrossed letters be involved in an overarching, theme-defining answer, so ... the "rule" was broken, technically, but not substantively). There's just not enough thematic material here, and (the big problem), what is here is not particularly evocative of CONFETTI, or of any PARTY in particular. I hope that app solvers at least got some kind of confetti-animation explosion at the end. Some bit of visual entertainment for your troubles. [Well, look at that ... I was correct on all counts]