Festive Surprise

The Festive Surprise is a content update for Grand Theft Auto V and Grand Theft Auto Online, released on December 18th, 2014 updating to version 1.19 on PS3 and Xbox 360 and Online to version 1.21 ( Story mode to 1.05)  on PS4 and Xbox One.

Description
The update features 4 vehicles including the Vapid Slamvan, a clean variant of the Rat-Loader called the Rat-Truck, a racing Massacro and a racing Jester. Over 90 new festive clothing options and 5 new themed masks are available. These are free, but available for a limited time. 30 new tattoos are available at all Tattoo Parlors. Themed clothing and masks from last year's Christmas special are also available again.

Special crate drops will also be dropping unlimited copies of the past events each day. Each day a new unique item and after that 24 hour they will be unobtainable. This includes, beer hats and many limited edition T-Shirts.

New Crate Items:
 * The Base 5 T-Shirt can be found in crates as the clothing brand makes a return from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
 * The Crocs Bar T-Shirt is a shirt that commemorates the Crocs Bar from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
 * The Vivisection T-Shirt that displays the game board logo that could be found advertised in various places in Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories.
 * The Emotion 98.3 T-Shirt was added to GTA Online, although glitches had unlocked it for some players previously, it is now officially available.

Christmas "Gifts"
The patch notes indicated that logging in on Christmas Day will reward the player with an unspecified gift, while logging in on Christmas eve, New Years eve and New Years day will gift Firework Launchers and free ammo.

"Players who log in on either the 24th December, 31st December, or the 1st January will be gifted a Firework Launcher with five rounds. The launcher will be permanently added to the player’s inventory. Players who already own the launcher will receive 5 rounds when logging in on each of the above days. The Christmas Day Gift will be available only to players who log in to play GTA Online on 25th Please note that this is only available from the Christmas Day Gift and cannot be purchased."

- Rockstar patch notes

The Christmas Gift comprised of:
 * Exclusive Stocking Mask.
 * Body Armor
 * 3 x Proximity Mines
 * 3 x Molotovs
 * Firework Launcher + 5 rockets
 * Carbine Rifle + 200 rounds

Additional Features

 * Players can now purchase a 3rd property.
 * Firework Launcher and Fireworks are available from 24th December until the 5th January.
 * Deadzone and Acceleration sliders have been added to control settings.
 * Five new parachute bags were added.
 * A Christmas tree is added to all apartments and Legion Square.
 * Snowballs added whilst Snowy weather is active. These can be gathered and stored by pressing D-pad Left when a player is unarmed. Nine Snowballs can be stored at a time and will disappear when swapping sessions or starting Jobs.
 * Issues with trees and foliage not moving with the wind on PS4 and Xbox One renditions are fixed.
 * The issue where adding Turbo upgrades to a vehicle made it slower is now fixed, along with many other bugs.

Trivia

 * The two newly added vehicles, the Vapid Slamvan and the Bravado Rat-Truck, which are vehicles from the 1930's-1950's, are a reference to Christmas specials It's a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Story, which take place in that era.
 * It is the first update to add a thrown weapon into the game.
 * There is an unfortunate bug introduced in this patch where sometimes when the player holds the button to activate the interaction menu, instead of getting the interaction menu, the game will lag severely until the player dies or leaves the session. This makes usual tasks such as ordering your personal vehicle, switching to passive mode and starting an impromptu race, difficult and even impossible. This bug was not fixed in the subsequent 1.20/1.06/1.22 patch released a week later.