Okay, as usual it seems they screwed up.
Here (in the community post) they say "Midnight EST and Noon EST on the 1st of January 2021", but in-game it says 11:30 PM EST (Dec1) and 12 PM EST (Jan1)
Also apparently the presents only drop in a undisclosed location, so only those who actually knew about that part got any presents on the live servers. It was not a server wide event as we're led to believe here. Nor did they actually tell anyone in-game (at least on The Island servers) about this.
So in conclusion, the community team and the dev team are both at ass-ends of the planet from each other with only a broken tin-can phone to communicate as they can't get anything right between them.