High Times in Vana'Diel: Christmas fun, Final Fantasy style!

It's that time of year again, and the Starlight Festival is in full swing. In years past I always blew off the winter holiday activities for one reason or another, but I vowed to try my hand at some of them this time around. It's actually been lots of fun, and I've made a decent amount of gil off of the items I've received as well; we all know how much everyone loves getting money for christmas... :)

The first of the mini-quests available is pretty simple: you go out into one of the newbie zones (I chose East Ronnfaure since I'm Elvaan and all) and destroy boxes to get Bell-Themed Tokens. These tokens are then exchanged for items; some food, some gear, all kinds of shit. After reading up on it, I made my way outside and started beating the crap out of some boxes...

"Yeah, die box!!! Merry Fucking Christmas!!!"

What a weak ass box...

"All right! A box full of boxes!! What an awesome gift!!!"

[sarcasm]"Man oh man, I hope this is another box full of boxes! That'd be SWEET!!"[/sarcasm]

Ok, to be fair, there was actually some decent drops out of the boxes, outside of the tokens, mainly food items. At first I was pretty ho-hum about it, until I realized that they can be vendored for up to 1k a piece to an NPC. When I discovered that, I was much more excited about breaking those boxes...and it also gave me something to do in between the other parts of the christmas stuff.

Next up was a mini-quest helping the Moogles deliver gifts to people. The best part is, it was always the same people, so it was just a matter of flagging the quest, talking to 4 peeps, and claiming my reward. They weren't even that far apart, so it was pretty painless, and I got some cool new clothes out of the deal. It could only be done once per Vana'diel day (roughly once an hour), but it ain't like I had anything else going on, so I ran around and did what I was told.

"Wow, there's a lot of Santa's around here today..."

"I've ran up and down this road like 12 times today! Kill me!!!!"

"Hey you! Betcha he like's my present better!!"

"Dude, why are you so surpised? I've been here literally twelve times now. I think you smoke to much ganja, player..."

And yet another mini-quest, giving Christmas cards to people. Basically, you talk to moogle who gives you card and tells you to find a certain race and gender to give it to, such as Hume man, or Tarutaru woman. The first night I did it, I was pulling my hair out, trying to find one goddamn person that met the requirements. Of course, I always got like Galka, and there'd be no Galkans anywhere at all. Or the ones that were around were like ignorant asses that wouldn't respond to tells. At any rate, Almeth found the trick to it, and I can't believe I didn't think of this sooner, considering the Easter event is somewhat similar...basically, if you're actually in a party with someone else, the cards you each get will match the other person in your group. So it's a real easy matter to trade the cards between each other, trade them to the moogle, then trade them back. This was another thing that could only be done once per Vana'diel day, but the reward was yet another Token that was able to be exchanged for some items.