In a press conference this morning at the North Pole, Santa Claus’s public relations representative confirmed that the hotly-anticipated Christmas, long planned to launch on December 25th of this year, has been pushed back out of this fiscal year to Q1 2010. The move comes as a major surprise to many industry analysts, who felt that Christmas was one of the few things that could pull the video game industry out of its recent spiraling downturn in sales and profitability.

The brief statement claimed that “progress on Christmas is coming along nicely, but we’re not quite where we wanted to be so close to launch. There are many features we just don’t see coming together in time for our planned launch date – and we would hate to see gamers disappointed by a Christmas that’s not all it could be.”

Fans have long been waiting for Christmas, and the hype has truly become deafening since a promising performance at E3 this year, when the title seemed to be on everyone’s lips. Since then, Christmas has quickly fallen out of favor with many in the video game community, and many told Hardcasual that Christmas’s chances of really flooring them seemed smaller and smaller every day.

Christmas’s fanatical fanbase, a group who have taken to calling themselves “Christians”, seem to be the most hurt by the news. “Just when I thought I really could be excited about something,” said John Luu, editor of Christmas2k9.com, the game’s most prominent fanblog. “I thought that I could be sure that Christmas would come this year. Instead, it appears that we’ll have to wait until 2010 to even see Christmas – this is almost as bad as the time my dad got laid off the week before Thanksgiving.”

Some industry analysts believe that Christmas was delayed due to the crowded Q4 2009 schedule. Longtime favorites like the newest installments of Channukah and Ramadan are expected to grab a huge chunk of the possible audience, and the surprising success of Kwanzaa at this year’s Independent Games Festival has made it a title to watch, one that some are already dubbing “This year’s Portal.”

We were lucky enough to get a brief audience with reclusive CEO Santa Claus, who seems to have continued his alarming trend of massive weight gain, and his chain pipe-smoking and ruddy complexion betrayed months of hard living. While Santa Claus would not go on the record about what exactly we could expect from Christmas, he strongly encouraged us to be “nice” in our words about the game.

When asked point-blank about the delay of Christmas, a source close to Santa Claus told us, “Listen. We know Christmas has the capacity to be huge this winter. But do you really think that we’d be able to stack up against Modern Warfare 2? I didn’t think so.”