Quote Originally Posted by Enkidoh View Post
Well, like many other seasonal events in FFXIV, it actually originated meta wise in FFXI, where the vague lore of the Starlight Festival in Vana'diel from what I remember was the 'smilebringers' would bring presents to children, with the original 'Smilebringer' believed to have been a goblin, but like much of FFXI's story and lore, it was very vague and obtuse. As FFXIV 1.0's original development team featured the same original producer as FFXI (Hiromichi Tanaka), it made sense FFXIV shared the same events more or less, but with lore altered to better fit the new game's setting and story.

Also the Ishgardian connection to the holiday's origins in Eorzea doesn't quite make sense (the references to "cold"), given that Coerthas and Ishgard were actually rather temperate originally (i.e., during 1.0), and it was only due to the Seventh Calamity that caused the new ice age the region finds itself locked in, so I regard the 'holiday started by Ishgardian knights help orphans during the bitter winter' thing as just a retcon. But that's just my own theory either way.
Coerthas was always cold. Just because there wasn't snow on the ground in 1.0 doesn't mean it never got cold there in winter. The 1.0 lore for the holiday also mentions Ishgard being freezing. It's just that now there's snow year-round and it sucks. Current NPCs mention that it has always been cold in Coerthas just not THIS cold. Anyone who's lived in the mountains can tell you that it can still be hot in the summer but you'll get feet of snow in the winter.

The 1.0 lore for the holiday is the same as it is now. According to the 1.0 Lodestone: Knights on patrol in Ishgard would try to help children orphaned by war living on the streets in the colder parts of the year. They would disguise them in their scarlet cloaks and bring them into the barracks. When the war died down, there were fewer orphans but the grown up ones decided to pay tribute to the guards that helped them and steer the tradition in a new way by dressing up in red cloaks again and giving gifts to the children of Ishgard during the coldest week of the year.