Below is the 2013 announcement. Should we participate? Vote below.

As another year draws to a close, we wanted to do something fun and lighthearted with our communities, as a way of celebrating the many amazing people who make the sites awesome. So, we’re announcing Winter Bash 2013!

Most of you probably remember last year’s event, but I’ll recap anyway, for the newbies among us. Winter Bash is an annual event that can run on any Stack Exchange site that chooses to participate. Users earn “hats” for their gravatars by completing certain tasks (analogous to badges). Certain actions trigger the user receiving a hat, which their gravatar can “wear”. We track everyone’s progress earning hats in a leaderboard that looks something like this: 

![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/TIZFD.jpg)

Winter Bash 2013 will again be available to all sites that choose to participate. We’re redesigning the landing page and redesigning all the hats to keep things fresh and exciting. 

Some Details

This event will run from 16 December 2013 to 3 January 2014. Users will be able to see their entire hat collection at <http://winterbash2013.stackexchange.com>. That site will also have a landing page, explaining the rules and other details of the event. 

Individual users who don’t want to participate, don’t want to see hats, and/or are generally anti-hat will have an “I hate hats” option available. And just like last time, at the end of the event, all hats will go back into storage. 

The only visual change to the Stack Exchange sites themselves will be the presence of the hats and the “I hate hats” button in the footer.