That isn't "Apple Intelligence" (which is the generative stuff held over to the .1 releases). What you're describing is inference metadata + basic search logic and has been in iOS and macOS for several major versions now, constantly improving.
And given that Christmas resolves to a date (it actually offers up the autocomplete of "Christmas Day" to make it easier, then simply making the search criteria a calendar date), for me it literally shows all photos on Dec 25. I guess mileage varies.
Well, except Apple specifically calls out this exact photo and video search function on their page titled "Apple Intelligence." Sure they've had some basic search already, but in their demos and advertising, they promise that Apple Intelligence is used to find photos by descriptions.
>Search for photos and videos in the Photos app simply by describing what you’re looking for. Apple Intelligence can even find a particular moment in a video clip that fits your search description and take you right to it.
If we accept Apple's claim that Apple AI is coming in beta in fall 2024 (or per the Canada page December 2024), and I have the release of 18 which by that restriction is not Apple AI enabled, I can already do complex semantic search which means that functionality can't be "Apple AI", right? And person on date has been in iOS for at least two prior generations as well. iOS has been allowing you to search by people in images, places, events, and text appearing in the image, along with broad categorizations like "sunset", "beach", etc, for at least two generations.
However when you're typing in a search, for each term it tries to contextualize it via selections. For instance if you already had "{Person} on " and then typed Christmas, it will let you pick if you mean Christmas the event, Christmas an "object", or Christmas the literal text (an icon of a couple of lines of text in a photo frame). I suspect the poster selected, probably unintentionally, Christmas the text and it gave them images where that text appears somewhere in the image. Just out of curiosity I did that and it gave me a set of images that I thought must be mistaken, but on each image somewhere the text Christmas could be found. In one it was a crazily distorted cursive writing on a table cloth hanging over the edge of a shelf, which is just crazy.
And given that Christmas resolves to a date (it actually offers up the autocomplete of "Christmas Day" to make it easier, then simply making the search criteria a calendar date), for me it literally shows all photos on Dec 25. I guess mileage varies.