We were there for Christmas last year!
I was no so sure how I would feel spending Christmas away from home since we have little kids (at the time 4 1/2 and 2 3/4) but we really enjoyed it! The crowds start arriving the week before Christmas so the parks are open later and thus no
MVMCP. It's still very neat though! Like an extra dose of magic.
Some of the special Christmas stuff...like the Santas in Epcot ends on the 24th but most of it continues through New Years. The Candelight Processional, lighting of Epcot's tree nightly, Osborne Family Spectacle of Lights, the MK Christmas parade etc.
We also arrived on 12/24 and had a Christmas Eve night to beat all other Christmas memories I have. We ended up getting there several hours later than we planned. We had promised our kids we'd take them to the MK once we arrived. We were with my parents in their RV and we had some trouble along the way. Our reservations for Ft Wilderness didn't start till 12/25 so we were spending 12/24 off site. The car wouldn't start when we unooked it from the RV so that added to the time it took to get going. Considering that the kids had slept ALL day in the RV for the trip down they were still wired so we decided to go ahead and go anyway (we had APs). We walked through the MK gates 10 minutes before the 2nd Spectro was to start. We got a spot right on Main Street and started our trip off with front row seats for Spectro. After that as everyone else was leaving we headed into the parks for about an hour and 45 minutes of rides with literally NO waiting. When the park closed we hung out on Main Street for a little while and were SO glad we did. Shortly after park closing they did the kiss goodnight on the castle but instead of changing colors like it normally does during the message, it had snowflakes on it. After the normal kiss goodnight message, the announcer says "oh and by the way, Merry Christmas!" We turned back around to head back down Main Street only to see that while our attention was on the castle, it had started SNOWING on Main Street. Seeing my kids twirling around in the "snow" and getting so excited about it after a "perfectly perfect" evening in the MK was THE BEST dose of Disney Magic ever!
Even with the insane crowds...it's still a great week to go! I HIGHLY recommend subscribing to
www.tourguidemike.com to anyone going that week. We've been the week between Christmas and New Years the last 2 years and both times we didn't wait more than 15 minutes for ANYTHING, most of the time it was under 10 minutes. WELL worth the $18 or so it was to sign up...for less than the cost of a counter service meal we gained a whole lot from that subscription!
