Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp's first big in-game event starts today

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp has only been available for about a week, but Nintendo is wasting little time in kicking off the game's first big event. As you probably already guessed, this first in-game event will be a seasonal one centered around the holidays. This keeps with the tradition of mainline Animal Crossing games, which generally also offer seasonal events like this.

Beginning today, players will receive a Santa hat in their mailbox, turning them into the Santa Claus of their campground. Going around and granting gifts to your campers – completing tasks, in other words – will grant you candy canes, which can then be used to create all sorts of holiday-themed campgrounds for your furniture. Nintendo shared an image of some of the items you can unlock during the holiday event, which you can see below.

The event will run from today until the day after Christmas, December 26, at 12:59 AM. You'll have just under a month, then, to collect holiday-themed items for your campground before they disappear until (presumably) next year's event. You'll want to hop to completing those requests, as it sounds like there will be plenty of holiday items to craft.

Though Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp makes a rather significant departure from mainline Animal Crossing games, there are certainly shades of the main titles present in this mobile outing. Bringing seasonal events to the mobile version of Animal Crossing is just one more way for Nintendo to make this feel familiar, and thereby keep series veterans playing longer.

It's going to be very interesting to see how Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp works out for Nintendo. While Fire Emblem Heroes seems to be making Nintendo a decent chunk of change, the company said it was ultimately let down by the total number of players who decided to buy Super Mario Run. Nintendo is still experimenting with mobile strategies, so maybe it finally struck the right balance with Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp? Time will tell, but in the meantime, head down to the comments section and let us know if you've been playing.