Holiday Recap

 

Now that the holidays have come and gone, the dust settled, the pine needles vacuumed, I wanted to take a second and look back at this past holiday season.  I know I mentioned last that we're in the middle of finding our new normal and what works for us during the holidays, so I feel like this is something that would be good for me to look back on for the upcoming year.

Last year (the 2016 holiday season) was basically put on hold.  The little one was too little to notice, and the big one was away at his dad's house for the actual Christmas day.  So we put it off until after New Year's day when the big one was home again and we were able to all be together.

This year, you can say we went all out.  For most people a Christmas Disney trip is huge.  Months of planning, reservations at various places to eat.  Plans on what to do.  Fast Passes booked at the booking window.  All the things.  For us, it's like a Wednesday.  Not to say that Disney isn't Magical or that we don't make any sort of plans, it's just that we don't try to cram everything into every trip. For a Disney trip, and a Christmas one at that, this was pretty low key.  And it worked for us.  I could claim to give the keys in how to low key a Disney trip, but that would be selling anyone short.  What works for us may not be someone else's cup of tea.

As a general Disney trip, we take a look at where we're staying (we have a goal of trying out as many of the on property resorts as we can) and what parks we want to visit.  For this last trip we did reserve a day per park, then looked at what we wanted to do the most for each one.

Hollywood Studios was the first stop.  Our main goal being to see Fantasmic.  This has been one of my favorite shows at the Disneyland resort for a long time, so I was interested in seeing how WDW did it.   We had a dinner reservation to try out one of the places we hadn't before, and the rest of the day was basically chill. 

For Christmas Eve we had a dinner booked for DVC Members, so we knew we wanted to do something near that venue.  Magic Kingdom was our park of choice.  Again, Disneyland goes all out with decorations and rides for the Christmas season, so we picked our favorites to Fast Pass and went from there.  We also booked a haircut for the little one which lucked us into an amazing spot to watch the Christmas Parade.  In case anyone was wondering, the "Jingle Cruise" at DL is done up more than the one in WDW.  Just saying.

Christmas day's goal was the Candle Light processional.  We had a dinner meal package for that, lucky enough for Fast Passes for Frozen, and a day to enjoy World Showcase.  Because we also want to try and do all the little side adventure type things we also did the KidCot adventure of taking Duffy around the world for the little one.  The big one decided to do the Agent P adventure for the day.

We also did a little browsing around Disney Springs in there and some exploring around our resort since we stayed at Boardwalk.  Overall, I would say it was a good choice, even though the parks can get crazy around the holidays.  Is it something we will continue to do year after year?  Still not sure. I suppose for now, as long as we're enjoying time together, then where and when doesn't really matter.