Broadsword Online Games have announced the worldwide release of Publish 91 for Ultima Online:

Greetings All,

With the help of many bug reports and a successful deployment on TC1, beginning 11/17/2015, Publish 91 will be deployed to all shards after their normal scheduled maintenance.

You can read about the exciting new content in Publish 91 here.

From all of us here we want to wish you and your family a very happy and healthy holiday season.

And based on that last line, you would be correct to infer that included in Publish 91 are a number of Christmas-themed rewards; full details are in the above-linked change notes.

The First Age of Update: Evidently there’s a bit of a bug with avians in Eodon:

All US shards will be coming down shortly to address avian concerns within the Valley of Eodon. We expect this downtime to last approximately 1 hour. Thank you and we apologize for any inconvenience.

Hopefully the shards aren’t down for too long.