Weekend Update – Christmas Around the Disney Globe

Christmas has started around the Disney world (not just Walt Disney World, hence the lowercase “world”), and it sounds like it’s going to be a great holiday season at the parks. Yes, there’s the new Jingle Cruise at Walt Disney World and the rest of the normally great Christmas offerings like Osborne Lights, Holidays Around the World at Epcot, and Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party, but those are mostly unchanged from previous years. It sounds like the big additions are elsewhere around the globe.

Disneyland Paris just kicked off its holiday season, and is already drawing rave reviews. I’ve seen some photos, and it looks like they’ve made some serious upgrades over last year. I have not watched video of Disney Dreams of Christmas (per last week’s update, I won’t before seeing it in person…hopefully it runs beyond this year!), but you should be able to find it on Dedicated to DLP or DLRP Magic’s Christmas pages.

Tokyo Disney Resort, as is the case with all of its seasonal events, has a lot of special entertainment, beautiful decorations, and crazy-delicious menu items. It also has the most seasonal attractions of any resort, with Haunted Mansion Holiday Nightmare, Country Bear Jingle Bell Jamboree, ‘it’s a small world’ very merry holidays, A Table is Waiting – Christmas Cuisine, and Big Band Beat Christmas Special.

Disneyland Resort has the new World of Color Winter Dreams and “Disney ¡Viva Navidad!,” a celebration of Latino culture, plus Jingle Cruise and all of the decorations to Cars Land and Buena Vista Street that were new as of last year, making its new or new-ish holiday slate very strong, as well.

Not nearly as much is known about Hong Kong Disneyland’s 2013 “A Sparkling Christmas,” which starts November 14, save for something new called “Puppets in the Park,” but it would be shocking if they didn’t try to build on their momentum after the opening of Mystic Manor earlier this year.

Main Street at Disneyland Paris during Christmas-time after every other guest has gone home.

Blog Update

This is sort of a non-update Weekend Update. I don’t have time for a normal update with links and everything, but I’m pretty excited about upcoming things (some of you have asked about certain things, and this should answer those questions), so it’s more of an update on the site in general, and where things are headed. Most of this is somewhat back of house type stuff that won’t interest many of you. But if you’re interested in rationale for the direction of the blog, I suppose you might care.

I also wanted to give you a heads up that things are going to be slow around here for the next couple of weeks. There will still be posts many days, but not every day, and there won’t be weekend updates. We’re going to be busy over the next couple of weeks, and won’t have the time for our normal posts. The Tokyo Disney Resort Trip Report will end this week, but the good news is that (if all goes according to plan) we will have three trip reports between now and Christmas to fill the void. So those of you who enjoy trip reports will hopefully be happy.

On the topic of trip reports, I am going to try to change up the style a bit. Currently, I write a particular installment of the report first, referencing photos to refresh my collection, and then add photos. I think this leads to a lot of tangents and text in general. I’m going to try adding the photos to the post first, and writing text around those. The style will be the same, but with presumably less text. I am not a fan of plain/monotonous trip ‘journals’ (“we did _____ attraction…then we did ___ attraction…then ____, and it was fun”) so don’t expect them to be devoid of personality. There are a few reasons for this change. First, with these weekend updates (and other op-ed posts), I’ve found a place outside of trip reports for my tangents that makes them easier to digest. Second, the ‘average time on page’ for the Tokyo trip reports has been 4:23, versus an average of 3:42 on the website as a whole, meaning that most people aren’t reading the full text of the reports, anyway. Finally, I have difficulty finding the time to write trip reports currently, and this should make it easier on me. I’m going to try this new style on the final installment of the Tokyo report. We’ll see if I stick with it…I’m a verbose person with the attention span of a dachshund (for you lucky non-dachshund owners, that’s pretty short), so the rambling text might be hard to avoid.

Although stats have influenced that decision, we aren’t going to become slaves to the stats. If we were, that would mean only writing about Walt Disney World, as our posts about it are statistically significantly more popular than any other Disney destination. As promised at the start of the Tokyo report, we are going to do a comprehensive Tokyo Disney Resort trip planning guide, and you’ll soon start to see the foundation for this, as we do posts on each of its restaurants, attractions, etc. We understand a lot of readers won’t care about these posts, but for the minority of you who do want to visit TDR, they should be valuable, especially since there’s so little comprehensive information about it online. (The actual guide itself won’t be done until the end of this year or early 2014, for those who have asked.) Plus, if these posts even convince one more person to visit the best Disney theme park complex on earth, they’ll be worth it from my perspective.

If Walt Disney World planning is all that interests you, don’t worry, as there will be plenty of posts about it going forward. While TDR is a big interest for me right now, I still love the other parks (except WDSP ;)), and I really enjoy providing thoughtful trip planning advice via blog posts. I am also ‘mildly’ opinionated, and like sharing those opinions. I also like discussing photography. I also like–you get the idea. This blog has always been fairly eclectic in focus, and as readership has grown, it has gone from friends who have largely shared my eclectic interests to a more diverse group. I’ve realized that you can’t please everyone with every post, so I don’t even bother with that. I only worry about writing things related to Disney that interest me. If the posts interest others, too, that’s awesome.

Anyway, that’s enough rambling for now. I’m pretty excited over what we’ve got coming up–hope you enjoy it, too!

Your Thoughts…

Heading to any Disney resort for Christmas? Suggestions for the blog? Share your thoughts in the comments!

22 Responses to “Weekend Update – Christmas Around the Disney Globe”
  1. Jenn @ Fairest Run of All November 13, 2013
  2. Heather November 11, 2013
  3. Aaron in DC November 11, 2013
    • Tom Bricker November 11, 2013
  4. [email protected] November 11, 2013
    • Tom Bricker November 11, 2013
    • mitch November 12, 2013
  5. ryan1 November 11, 2013
    • Tom Bricker November 11, 2013
    • Aly November 12, 2013
    • ryan1 November 15, 2013
  6. Aly November 11, 2013
    • Tom Bricker November 11, 2013
  7. Tony November 11, 2013
    • Tom Bricker November 11, 2013
  8. Stephen November 11, 2013
    • Tom Bricker November 11, 2013
  9. Magic Mirror November 10, 2013
    • Tom Bricker November 11, 2013
  10. Kevin November 10, 2013
    • Tom Bricker November 10, 2013
    • Kevin November 11, 2013

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *