Wrap up plushies and bathing suits, along with a picture of the ship? Follow that with the phone call. Oh! If you make it from Santa, you can all have packages with bathing suits and the picture in it.
We bought Mickey and Minnie rolling luggage for each of our three girls and packed them with swim suits , Disney t-shirts, snorkel and masks and printed out personalized messages (I downloaded a disney font and DCL cruise graphics) . HUGE hit, and followed it up with phone call. For following cruises , I had purchased the replica ship ornament and hung it on the tree for them to find. Have fun with it !
My experience with the character call was a fail. My kids only caught half of what mickey said and didn't make the connection they were going until I brought out the cruise book with their names in it.
We LOVE the character calls! But we've never used them as the reveal, just afterwards for a fun follow up . But now that we're mentioning them, maybe I *will* use just that as our reveal , our kids are old hats at cruising and will DEFINITELY be excited for (and understand) the call!
Go on YouTube and search for Disney Cruise Surprise Reveal, there are TONS of videos there that will give you some ideas how to surprise you kiddies with the trip. Oh and be sure to record your own reveal!
This was my experience as well. It seems like on any Disney call, whenever there is a recording (e.g., touch-tone prompts, on-hold music, these character calls), the recording mutes whenever it senses noise coming from your end of the line. So if the kid is holding the phone to their ear but is talking ("Who is it, Mommy?") or there is other background noise when the character starts his spiel, the sound is muted until the noise stops, and you thus miss half the recording. I have found that muting your own phone to kill all noise on your end of the line helps.
We also did the ship ornament on the Christmas tree. We just told the kids our family present was on the tree and they had to find it. The littlest one was the first to figure it out!
We had specially made large fortune cookies that had the message inside them. It took awhile for the kids to figure out it was for them specifically.
Checkout some ideas on the thread Need help surprising the kids, Depending on if you have pre-cruise plans the possibilities are endless
