Another year's nearly at an end, which means delicious food and presents have us surrounded on all sides. Incidentally, the entire team at Splash Damage would like to wish all our readers a supremely Happy Christmas and a safe holiday period. 2009 was an eventful year for the studio and 2010 promises to bring even bigger and better things.

Now, last year's Christmas Tapirthon was a huge success and raised some 1250 pounds to help conserve tapirs around the world. What's a tapir, you say? Why, it's a large browsing mammal, roughly pig-like in shape, with a short, prehensile snout. Well, at least if you believe Wikipedia. It's also Splash Damage's company mascot and with all four of the tapir species facing extinction, we try to raise awareness (and money) for their cause whenever possible.

With that in mind, we decided to put the fun in fund-raising and turn this year's Splash Damage Christmas Cards into a little game of their own. You see, once opened up, each of the cards features an illustrated background and a separate sticker sheet. The sticker sheet is filled with Tapirs, TapirClothes™, TapirGuns™, and TapirAccessories™, all of which can be combined to create a custom TapirScene™. Confused? Check out AusGamers, ScrewAttack, or the Bethesda Blog for their awesome, customised cards.

Right, the fund-raising part. For each TapirScene™ posted up online and sent to tapirs@splashdamage.com, we will donate 50 pounds to the tapir conservation project over at tapirs.org to help research and preserve all species of tapir for the generations to come. To help you keep track of where this year's Tapirthon is at, we've added a new box to website listing all the submissions we've had so far and how much money's been raised by way of a cute and cuddle tapir.

So, once again, happy holidays to everyone out there. We hope to see you all again in the new year.