I for one am glad SE stopped trying to shove every single event into a FATE.

Very few FATE-based events have been fun. This daily quest is fun (for me), and a bit like a scavenger hunt if you don't want to/don't know tree locations. Yes, it's a bit annoying that it'll run through a lot of people's holiday plans, but considering this is the exact time frame they did it last year, I don't really know why it wasn't expected. I've rarely seen SE deviate from their normal time frames for seasonal events every year.