With Thanksgiving over, Animalia and Lyre began looking forward to the next event: Christmas and New Years. In most cases, especially with Animalians, such things were kept track of with an Advent calendar. However, there were some other things that people were preparing for that weren't so close as Christmas and New Years.
---
With Animalia's 8th Anniversary coming up, there was going to be a big group wedding for Animalia Ambassadoria's first members. In an unexpected twist, Miss Juliet invited them, and anyone who wanted to come with them, to Renardville. While unexpected, it wasn't turned down outright because of the popularity of Paris as a wedding venue. However, they wouldn't be agreeing with it right away because Paris would be hosting the 2024 Olympics, not to mention there was also a massive outbreak of bedbugs in Paris earlier in the year, but, fortunately, it was nowhere near Miss Juliet's estate or Renardville.
However, Miss Juliet would be acting a bit proactively this year. First, she had arranged a Winter Break vacation at Mieni Atoll, both for her and her students and staff. Meanwhile, the estate would be fumigated for bedbugs, once again, while everyone was on break. While some would raise their eyebrows at these kinds of trips, Miss Juliet and her school was developing a reputation of having "better field trips" than other schools, though this was up for debate in some places.
---
Another thing that was planned for the future was another Island for Asian Animalians that had been found near the beginning of November. However, it was much too small for "large-scale colonization", but it was large enough, and close enough to the Equator to function as a tropical vacation resort, with "permanent inhabitance" by the resort island employees. Both Japan and China knew this would result in comparisons, albeit erroneous, with the Dead or Alive Extreme Series video games, so they didn't do anything to stop them. The end result was that many feminists, and similarly "woke" individuals, were hilariously exposed as hypocrites, much to their embarrassment (especially since several of them exposed this way ended up deleting their social media accounts due to the backlash).
---
Another thing that was going on was the building of the Lyre/Animalia's new "Russian District". This had been on the table ever since Lyre's "Chinatown" district was founded during the Pandemic, but the conflict in Ukraine had pushed the development of this "district" into top priority. While this did spark the usual xenophobes and paranoiacs, there were those who were now comparing Animalia to Zootopia, with generally mixed results, especially in the case of memes.
---
Finally, Dexio and Arlette were planning to spend the winter (and their second date) in Mieni Atoll. Dexio was certainly warming up to Arlette, but his only regret was that she was gladly telling everyone who asked, no matter who they were, about their first date at the Slaughterhouse during Halloween. However, he was glad that Animalia's PR-MD agents were keeping out the gossipmonger agencies, which would "misinterpret" her story in all kinds of ways.