The XNA Game Studio team seem to announce releases for the 'Holiday XX' season (where XX is a year). This has caused some confusion to users outside the USA...

The holiday season starts at Thanksgiving and ends after New Years Day. A reasonable approximation could be called 'December' though there is an approximate error of about 5 days or 2.7% in this case.

Many stores in the USA feel that the Holidays is not long enough for them to make a good profit selling Britney Spears perfume, pet rocks and Santa hats so they extend the holiday period earlier and earlier every year. Often this means that 'The holidays' starts right after Halloween is over on November the first. Its highly unlikely that the XNA team will adopt this definition.

Microsoft release dates are also flexible. Bob 2.0 is still awaiting its official release and its expected to be sometime after Duke Nukem Forever ships. So it is always possible that 'Holiday XX' will be officially slipped to last longer by Microsoft's crack legal team. This is a good thing because 'the holidays' are wonderful times when you can eat too much, drink too much and give The Zman lots of wonderful presents.....

Finally I should point out that Game Studio Express 1.0 released on December 11th 2006 and Game Studio 2.0 released on December 13th 2007. Both were originally in the "Holiday XX" release schedule. This of course means nothing for future releases but some people like to draw conclusions....