This document provides a summary of recent holiday messaging trends and recommendations for 2012. It discusses declining open and click-through rates for holiday emails in 2011 compared to 2010. It also notes spikes in purchasing around Halloween and Black Friday. Recommendations include starting holiday marketing earlier, pairing email with other channels, developing post-holiday plans, testing different subject lines and segmentation strategies. Specific best practices are outlined for areas like creative design, social media integration, and messaging for Thanksgiving weekend. The overall goal is helping brands optimize their holiday emails to drive more opens, clicks and purchases.