Did you read the interview at Joystiq? The part where mrfredman said the next addition would be hats? You probably thought that he was just trying to be be funny and that we weren't really planning that. Well, you were right. So we went ahead and did it anyway.

Here's the deal with this year's Christmas Special: Instead of just giving away the festive gear, we're making you work for it. You're smart guys, so I'll leave it up to you to figure it out. Here's a hint though: There's some randomness involved, and there are two ways to get your gear: one is naughty, one nice.
The new version is fully compatible with 2.2.3, thanks to some protocol extension magic I stole from Vinmod. However, you will only see hats on servers running the new version.