FarmVille Holiday Tree 2011: Everything you need to know

Continuing in the tradition of FarmVille Holiday celebrations, tonight marks the launch of this year's Holiday Tree in the game. However, instead of simply being a collection event where you'll redeem mass amounts of presents for singular items, this year's event goes back to the setup of 2009's Holiday Tree, in that we'll still be able to collect tons of presents, but will be able to open each one of them once Christmas arrives to find out what's inside.

You'll receive your Holiday Tree for free the next time you login to the game. If you're not on the farm you'd like to be to place this one, just cancel out of "Placement Mode" and travel to the farm you'd like this tree to be on (even if that isn't Winter Wonderland). From there, you'll be able to empty out your gift box of any Holiday Gifts you've already claimed from your Santa's Sleigh, and can then go to town asking friends for more gifts to really fill out the tree. You can simply ask your friends for gifts, or you can send one of six different gift designs to friends from the free gifts page, hoping that they'll return the favor. You can also purchase gifts with Farm Cash.

As you collect gifts, your tree will grow, going through five stages of upgrades until you hit the 300 gift total. We're told that we can collect "over 300 gifts" however, so there doesn't look to be a limit to how many it can actually hold (we're working to confirm that, and will let you know as soon as we hear back from Zynga). Regardless of how many gifts we all eventually end up with, we won't be able to open them until Christmas Eve - December 24. At that point, we'll either be allowed to open gifts individually (as we did back in 2009 - a time consuming process), or we might be able to open them like we can Special Delivery Boxes, but simply entering in a number and letting the game sort out the contents.

As for what's inside these gifts, unfortunately that's a mystery as of this writing. As we get closer to Christmas, we'll make sure to let you know if we learn what the contents of some of these gifts might be, so keep checking back with us!