You’re in luck, ‘cause I’m one such person! And, I’m the only one left from those days that’s still active in this fandom on here (as far as I am aware).
Anyway, when we all found out that Hoxton was coming back, that was the hypest shit ever. Like, we almost couldn’t unlock him fast enough during that Crimefest. There was a bunch of keyboard smashing, pretty much everyone was on Tumbles daily, and there were loads of posts about it. The trailer was a HUGE hit here, and people were bouncing off the walls trying to figure out how Hox got his burn scars, what the heist was gonna entail, and people just generally creaming their jorts over hearing Pete Gold’s voice again. It was a wonderful time to be on this site, quite honestly.
However, the reveal was NOT the Christmas album--that’s a current age/new player misconception. The album was just OVERKILL’s way of saying:
“Hey, we know about the petition you guys made and had a fuckload of people sign to bring back the Brit. Here’s some Christmas songs sung by Hoxton as a treat. ;)”
And, ya know, while it was really cool, it irritated a lot of people ‘cause it was just an album, not our boy comin’ back. It kind of became it’s own conspiracy theory thing for awhile too, ‘cause people were arguing back and forth over ‘whether or not this is a sign from OVK that we’re getting Hoxton back’. There were groups of people in the ‘yes, they will’, ‘no, they won’t’, ‘I guess we’ll see’, and ‘shut up about the stupid Brit that no one but cringe people like’ camps. While it didn’t dominate discussion on here, it did come up a lot, ‘cause there were a lot of Hox fans back then.
So, yeah. Tumbles basically became like this once his return was announced:
And then once he actually came out: