The Christmas update introduces thirteen new pets, each tied to cold mutations, festive cosmetics, or experimental mechanics that shake up familiar farming strategies. While some of these pets exist purely for fun, several of them offer genuine meta-shifting abilities. This Grow a Garden Christmas Pets guide walks through every new pet, how their passives work, and the type of setups where they shine, giving you a clear picture of their strengths and weaknesses.
All Grow a Garden Christmas Pets and Abilities Explained
Snow Bunny
The Snow Bunny continues the long tradition of rabbit-style pets offering basic value boosts. It consumes carrots to increase shekels and gives bonus experience to all other bunnies and rabbits in your garden. Even with the added Christmas flavor, its ability remains underpowered, especially compared to high-yield pets introduced later in the update. This is more of a collector piece than a strategic option.
Mistletoad
The Mistletoad behaves like a festive variant of other frog pets. It croaks at a random nearby plant, pushing its growth forward and applying chilled mutations to all fruits on that plant. The combination of progression plus mutation application makes it more desirable than the Snow Bunny, but it’s still a support-oriented pet rather than a centerpiece of any strategy.
Snowman Soldier
The Snowman Soldier periodically generates snowballs, which are purely for playful interaction. You can throw them at other players, but they offer no mechanical benefit to your farm. This pet exists to add holiday charm rather than game efficiency.
Giant Snowman Soldier
The giant version functions identically, only with a larger model and cosmetic appeal. Like the standard version, its value lies in entertainment rather than utility.
Snowman Builder
This pet occasionally consumes crops with any cold-type mutation and gives a snow-fort cosmetic reward. It directly mirrors the pumpkin rat from the Halloween event, offering cosmetic farming rather than practical progression. Players who enjoy collecting seasonal creations will find more use for it than those pursuing raw efficiency.
Giant Snowman Builder
The giant version offers the same ability at a larger scale. It’s another cosmetic-forward pet that makes your garden feel alive during the event.
Gift Rat
Gift Rat acts as a themed variant of pets like the Koi by converting apples into random gift cosmetics. Because these cosmetics have several collectible variants, it gives completionists another long-term goal. Mechanically, it doesn’t increase yield or speed, so its value depends entirely on how much you enjoy cosmetic hunting.
Penguin
Every twelve minutes, the Penguin transforms you into a sliding belly-flop penguin for a short duration. During that period, the penguin slides from fruit to fruit in your garden and applies the Arctic mutation. It’s functionally similar to cheetah-type pets but far more visually entertaining. Since Arctic mutations have niche uses, the Penguin fits best in gardens that revolve around mutation chains rather than raw income.
Christmas Gorilla
This pet steps into the practical side of the update by reducing cooking time whenever it grabs a crop with a cold-type mutation. It mirrors the Drake pet, but its holiday twist makes it especially useful for players who rely heavily on cooking cycles. If you’re pushing timed recipes or crafting challenges, the Christmas Gorilla fits naturally into those builds.
Krampus
Krampus is the most divisive pet introduced this season. It periodically consumes a percentage of your shekels to punish a random player on the server. The more severe the punishment, the higher the shekel cost. Although it technically rewards you for causing chaos, the percentage-based shekel drain makes it a risky choice. With a drop chance of only 0.05 percent, it’s incredibly rare, but its practical value is far lower than its rarity suggests.
Arctic Fox
The Arctic Fox stands out as one of the strongest pets in the update. It steals fifteen unique fruits from your garden and refreshes the seed shop, ignoring favored fruit rules. This ability makes it extremely efficient for seed reroll strategies, especially because it can be mimicked. Players looking for a flexible, high-utility pet will quickly realize how much control it adds to their gameplay loops. Its role is similar to the Red Panda but with broader situational power.
French Hen
The French Hen increases the size multiplier of all Christmas-type plants within its range. It’s straightforward but surprisingly useful because size multipliers directly increase value. Anyone planning to farm event plants for profit or milestone contribution should consider including this pet in their garden.
Frost Dragon
The Frost Dragon is the crown jewel of the update and easily one of the most impactful pets added in any season. It carries two passives that work incredibly well together:
- Frozen-to-Glacial Conversion
It converts all frozen mutations within range into glacial mutations. Each mutation converted grants XP to every other pet in your garden, up to 10,000 XP per conversion cycle. This creates explosive scaling across your entire pet collection. - Glacial Mutation Spread
When you sell a fruit with a glacial mutation, there’s a chance the Frost Dragon applies one of that fruit’s mutations to another fruit in your garden. This mirrors the behavior of pets like Mizuchi, unlocking rapid mutation spread and high-value chains.
The Frost Dragon is a Season 3 Battle Pass exclusive, which means players must actively participate in the season to obtain not just the base version but ideally a divine version as well. Given its ability to reshape mutation strategies entirely, it rivals or even surpasses pets like the DLO in raw utility. If you care about progression efficiency, this is the pet you prioritize above all others.
This Christmas lineup balances fun, cosmetics, experimentation, and a few genuinely powerful mechanics. While several pets exist purely for entertainment, a handful of them significantly expand mutation strategies and crafting efficiency. If you want maximum impact on your garden, focus on the Arctic Fox, Christmas Gorilla, French Hen for seasonal efficiency, and above all, the Frost Dragon.