A quick Christmas thank you

Merry Christmas, they said. Good tidings to all men, they said. Well here it is. Just a quick note to say thank you for the best year of The Shiznit's existence yet. Humbugs for everyone!

It's Christmas Day and I'm already drunk on sherry (well, I would be if I wasn't writing this the day before) so prepare for the following awkward outpouring of emotions. Rest assured, the booze will wear off and the self-loathing will kick in about halfway through my second box of Celebrations, so make the most of my Jimmy Stewart phase while it lasts.

Thank you.

Thank you for everyone who's visited the site this year; thank you to everyone who followed us on Twitter or liked us on Facebook; thank you to each of you who forwarded on our links, or submitted one of our articles to Reddit, or stumbled upon us on StumbleUpon. (That's a thing, right?)

This year has been the most successful year in our seven-year history. We finally started getting enough traffic to hook up with a proper ad provider, which means the three of us - that's Luke, Matt and myself - have finally been able to pay for server costs etc using a dedicated site fund and not from our childrens' college funds. That's because of you guys.

We've also finally started to reach people outside of our small but dedicated userbase, mostly thanks to Twitter and everyone's exceedingly kind 'Follow Friday' suggestions. Without those, we would have never buddied up with the likes of Ultra Culture, Your Turn Heather, Robbie Collin, The Incredible Suit, Sam and Simon at the Picturehouse Podcast, Matt and Giovana at Sky and all the other wonderful people who make each day online so fun. Thank you all.

While we're tooting our own trumpet, special festive hugs to the AWESOME CELEBRITIES who helped spread the word this year. We've had retweets from luminaries like Armando Iannucci, David Mitchell, Edgar Wright, Claudia Winkleman and Emma Freud. Actors like Olivia Wilde and Jason Alexander liked our stuff and tweeted them to their followers. We've interviewed the likes of Bruce Campbell, Olivia Colman, Ben Wheatley and Ben Mendelsohn, not one of whom pointed out that TheShiznit.co.uk really is a stupid fucking name for a film website.

Oh, and may I just remind you that NICOLAS FUCKING CAGE was made aware of one of our features? That still blows my goddamn mind.

So thank you, from the bottom of my heart. Running the site does tend to take up most of our spare time (I know, we make it sound such fun!) so I think I can speak on behalf of all three of us when I say that each and every time you stop by and check in is appreciated. Hopefully you'll stick around and continue to #FF and retweet and stumble and make us RICH and FAMOUS and BETTER THAN YOU.

Clearly the booze and goodwill is wearing off. I'm about to try and fit as many mini-Mars Bars in my mouth as possible. Mwffry Cwfftsmffs!