Editor's blog: Merry Christmas!

What's the best Christmas song, eh? Good question, and the answer, as I'm sure you know, is Christmas Wrapping by The Waitresses. What a classic. A nice tune and a whimsical TV-special narrative. And at the heart of it, the message: Christmas is not just a single day. Christmas is not just for Christmas. It's the culmination of an entire year's worth of incident.

All of which is to say, we're knocking off for a bit. 2016 has been a pretty wretched year if you're a fan of Bowie, Prince, Zaha Hadid, Alan Rickman, liberal democracy. But it's been an incredible year for games, one of those quietly astonishing periods where almost everything has something special to it, whether it's that level in Titanfall 2 - or Dishonored 2 - or the glorious alien-intellect complexity of The Witness, or the sheer never-again lavishness of Uncharted 4, a game which built entire cities just so you had something to race through in a one-shot sequence that was gone in seconds. Now 2016 is almost gone. What did you play? And what will you be playing in those special few days away from work, or school or university? What's your Christmas game going to be?

Even though we'll be off, we can still keep you company in the days ahead. We've got some lovely stuff going up, from a look at the year from the perspective of the Japanese games industry to an examination of the details that made the games of 2016 so special. We'll also have Games of the Year: our choices and yours. How close are we?

We'll be back in January, a month which The Waitresses failed to immortalise in song, so we'll have to start making it up as we go again. Can't wait to get back to it. Can't wait to see what games will show us in 2017.