This is a developing, late breaking story!!
Christmas may be over, but also, it’s really only about 10 months away! 
The idea of doing 2d animation in a 3d software such as Blender is an interesting one to me. While I can see the potential, I can also see lots and lots of labor and limitations. As I am one who loves to move my camera around and have cool angles and lighting and all that jazz, it seems to me if I chose to tell a story in this fashion, I would have to make some sacrifices.
More on that later.
The basic idea here is to draw the separate pieces of the character in your favorite software (I used Illustrator then tidied up in Photoshop), export them as PNG files with a transparent background, and import the images as planes inside of Blender.
This really is the best of both worlds – combining hand drawn characters with a 3d armature. Seems the animation process would be faster as well. Drawing frame by frame is the romantic way of doing things, but you only live once, and time is flying by!! While this character does not yet have a rig installed, the technique is fairly simple.
I’m not saying I’m doing a 2d animation in 3d, but when I saw this idea come to life at Albinal.com, naturally, I needed to dig deeper.
This particular version of Santa is relatively small in size. I think the dimensions of his hand are 112×179. I didn’t expect to have the greatest render results from such a small image, but I was pleasantly surprised and though some images seem slightly blurry to me, I know it is all manageable through a higher res starting image.
Anyway, that’s all for now..
Cheers,
