There is a Reddit thread I found via John Mueller that claims a site owner woke up to an additional $80,000 in monthly traffic. The person said that over the past several days his traffic skyrocketed 6,000 percent because his rankings for a very competitive term reached the fifth position in Google Search.
How is that for a nice holiday gift from Google? The site owner said "Google threw my website in 5th place for an extremely high volume high difficulty keyword with a volume of 7.4M not including its synonyms." He added that he feels it is "unlikely to maintain this position" for the ranking of that keyword in Google Search. But the position so far has "been holding steady for 4 days."
The comments on Reddit and Twitter are fun to read.
Have you ever had such a holiday gift from Google?
Forum discussion at Reddit.