when do the Christmas crowds arrive?

[lissiesmum]

We are planning for a WDW trip in December 2009 and will be staying for 10 days at POR. We were thinking of going the week after Thanksgiving, but four days of our trip will overlap with Pop Warner so we were thinking maybe we could try the week after they leave which would start on Dec 13 of that year. SO, Christmas falls on a Friday that year so I was wondering if the Christmas week would be the week leading up to that Friday, or the week following that Friday? OR would it spill over to two weeks? I hope this makes sense. It is our first trip and I was hoping to go during the Christmas season but go before the crowds get there....

 

[Bob P]

Crowds start getting very heavy the weekend before Christmas...so figure around December 18 or 19, 2009.

 

[lissiesmum]

Thanks, Bob. That's what I figured but I was hoping it would go the other way! We'll probably be better off dealing with the POP Warner crowd for a few days then!

 

[Devil_Dog99]

DW and I have been going at Christmas for 9 years so we have seen Christmas fall on just about every day of the week. We always arrive on or about the 17-19th. Regardless of when the 25th falls, the crowds really start to build beginning the 22nd or 23rd and getting progressively worse. We 'beat' the crowds by doing all the e-ticket attractions on the early days of our trip when the crowds aren't so bad. And if yof follow the UG touring plans, you will not notice the crowds at all, except in the afternoons when you see all the long lines at the attractions you walked on that morning.

 

[Stinky_Pete]

A few years ago I went for the 2 weeks before Christmas (flew home Christmas day). I don't remember what day of the week Christmas was on though.

The week right before Christmas was noticably busier than the week prior to that, though certainly not nearlyas busy as I'm sure Christmas week was.

 

[IMDORY]

We were there last Christmas 12/22 to 12/31. I've visited WDW at all different times of the year-crowed, semi-crowded, empty with many of the major attractions down for refirbishment.. The crowds were not too bad until 12/26...I mean, crowded, but after the 26th, the wait times for major rides got really, really, long. The lines for most things just were huge and the crowds just got a bit worse every day leading up to NYE. We ate a Noon lunch at Garden Grill at EPCOT on 12/28, on our way we passed a line of people waiting to get into The Seas With Nemo and Friends that went all the way back to the Character Connection area. I could not believe that people would wait in lines like that! We managed to see the bulk of the main stuff we wanted to see in the first few days, and then just picked away at the parks after that. We never waited more than 40 minutes for anything during that entire trip because we used our fastpasses and tried to take advantage of "weird" times at the parks, earlier in the am, EMH in the evenings. One night we were on Soarin' at 12:45am! That was the 40 minute wait...most things were under 30 minutes-I wouldn't enter a line if it said more than 30 minutes wait-I'm not big on waiting in long lines.