Celebration? There was no celebration. The gnomes are normally at a higher rate during vault weekend. That is the only best time time to farm runes.
Devs created some drama. Applying some strategy to make players beg for cursed gnome. We technically need ONLY a limited number of runes (about 1040???) and the others are optional (too expensive).
In fairness, the Devs strategy is working for some players. Next announcement, we get more runes than verses. 
I can have 100k vault keys and still very happy about it, but not with runes.