As seasons change, so do things in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, as Nintendo has announced the game’s winter update will be going live soon.The seasonal event will begin on Thursday, November 19, and will add holiday celebrations for Thanksgiving and a winter holiday that is distinctly Christmas, with no alternative for anyone who might celebrate anything else. So who’s ready to unpack the realization of all the violence and horror of the Christian Bible being a known quantity in the Animal Crossing universe? Not me! So let’s dig into the event instead.
On November 26, the game will be celebrating Thanksgiving with a Turkey Day dinner at town’s square, with all of your island inhabitants eating a dinner made fresh and served by Franklin the turkey. Hopefully there’s no actual turkey to be eaten here because Animal Crossing: New Horizons has enough vaguely menacing undertones and we don’t need to add cannibalism to that list. You can help the dinner along by bringing Franklin various ingredients so he has more at his disposal to cook with.
Following that on December 24 is Toy Day, which will bring distinctly Christmas-like decorations to your island, despite the vaguely neutral name. If the Christmas trees and Santa hats were too subtle, the visiting character for the event is Jingle, a reindeer who asks you to help deliver presents to all your island neighbors. So it looks like Animal Crossing: New Horizons doesn’t have any Kwanzaa or Hanukkah equivalent thing going on. At the very least doubling down on the secular side of Christmas means I don’t have to reckon with the implication that Timmy and Tommy are aware of the story of Cain and Abel. This was already basically implied by the existence of Bunny Day, the Animal Crossing Easter equivalent, but that also was pretty careful to not use any of the language that directly tied it to the Christian holiday. But while Jesus’ birth is not mentioned here, Santa is mentioned by name in the trailer. So do with this information what you will.
Along with the new events, the winter update is bringing new cosmetics like hairstyles and additional reactions, as well as additions to the amount of garbage you can hoard in your house with expanded storage.
Check out the winter update trailer below:
While that’s everything that’s coming to the game side of things, on the backend side, Nintendo is finally adding the ability to transfer Animal Crossing: New Horizons save data from Switch to Switch. The feature will launch alongside the Winter update on Thursday, and will allow you to move either your entire island to a new system or just your character and all their belongings. This will be good for folks who have had hardware issues that required them to get a new Switch. So for more on that, check out Nintendo’s website.
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The trailer ended with a tease for the next update that will be coming in January. Interestingly enough, we’re nearing a full calendar year since Animal Crossing: New Horizons came to the Switch in March. This means we’ll be seeing soon if Nintendo is going to keep coming up with new events and content for the game or if some of the same seasonal content will be coming back. Will Zipper the Bunny Day Bunny be back on our islands soon? We’ll find out early next year, I suppose.
