Party on Wayne, Party on Garth

December 27, 2023

My wife and I have been back from Walt Disney World for a couple of weeks now, and I have thoughts. Traditionally, the first week of December is our absolute favorite time to visit. We love Christmas, we love Disney, we NOT dealing with peak holiday crowds… it’s a no-brainer. Now I am not going to word-vomit every observation in this post as it would be entirely too long. However, I will be composing several articles over the next few weeks to cover my impressions about our early December visits to the Rat.

Today I will be tackling WDW’s holiday parties. There are two parties being offered this year: Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party at Magic Kingdom and Disney Jollywood Nights at the Studios. We attended both of these events three days apart. So let’s look at each and see what our “first timer perspective” looks like.

MVMCP:

This event is held at Magic Kingdom from 7 PM to midnight, but party guests can enter as early as 4:00 PM and the park closes to day-guests at 6:00 PM. As we are Annual Passholders, we swooped into the normal line at 5:30 or so and went to Tomorrowland to get our party bracelets. This was a great move since the line for party-only guests outside the turnstiles was bananas. After receiving our bracelets, we also got our Toy Soldier Christmas ornaments, which were pretty nice. Following that, the evening was ours.

We really wanted to experience the attractions with holiday overlays, so we hit up Jingle Cruise and Tomorrowland Speedway. We wanted to do Space Mountain, but honestly, my back was just not playing nice that day, so we skipped that one. Jingle Cruise is always good, and we had a decent skipper. It was my first time ever doing the Speedway, and if it weren’t for the music (which admittedly, you could barely hear) and the fantastic lights, it would be a one and done. The attractions were fine, but we really wanted to experience the party-exclusive stuff.

We skipped the dance parties as that isn’t really our bag. We did see the Frozen Holiday Surprise, Mickey’s Most Merriest Celebration, Mickey’s Once Upon a Christmastime Parade, and Minnie’s Wonderful Christmastime Fireworks Show. The first two on that list were meh. The end of the Frozen Holiday Surprise had Elsa decking out the castle in lights, and it is okay, but is a comically bad caricature of the Cinderella Castle Dream Lights. Those were jaw-dropping. These are not.

Now the latter two on that list were pretty excellent. The fireworks show had some castle projections, but they really weren’t the main focus like many of the other nighttime spectaculars. The musical score and the pyro were the stars of the show.

That parade tho.

I am not a parade guy. I think parades are great time to hop on attractions because a large percentage of guests are watching the parade. This parade, however, is not to be missed! It is very long and that would normally be a drawback, but the floats, the characters, and the spacing is excellent. All of the performers do a fantastic job at interacting with the guests, and the toy soldier battalion is incredible. Mickey’s Once Upon a Christmastime Parade is terrific. It is almost worth the price of the party. Almost.

Before tackling Jollywood Nights, let’s just get the main negative of both parties out of the way. If you’re not a “character person”, it will be nearly impossible to get good value from either party. My wife and I have zero interest in characters. I know that is sacrilege for most Disney fans, but there it is, in all its naked truth. I don’t do pictures with the characters. I don’t hug the characters. A high-five to Big Al in FrontierLand is the closest I ever get to an interaction. With that being one of the major draws of both holiday parties (probably more so with MVMCP than Jollywood Nights), it isn’t hard to see why the parties are likely a one-and-done for us. I just can’t pay close to $200 per ticket for a parade and pre-packaged cookies.

Disney’s Jollywood Nights:

The Jollywood Nights holiday party at the Studios is in its infancy. In a few years, if it makes it that long, it may be something we would do again if they add more to it. After seeing reviews of the first party, I was pretty nervous about this one. That first event was a total dumpster-fire. Luckily, Disney learned and adapted pretty quickly. Once again, we entered as day guests and got our wristband inside which was seamless and super quick.

I’ve heard complaints that the party is too short, and you can’t do everything. However, once again, if you aren’t a character person, it is relatively easy to do it all. We started off the party standing in line to get into the Holidays in Hollywood show. This show was amazing! My wife, who has a background in dancing, was blown away by the choreography. Disney always does great with stage shows, but this was next level. After that we checked out the Twilight Soiree at the Tip-Top Club in front of the Tower of Terror. The Musicians were good, but the sets were short, and the drinks were honestly terrible. We then rode Tower while we were down that way. We went back to the Star Wars Launch Bay area and did both of the special photo ops. These were pretty long lines, but also two of the coolest experiences of the evening.

We tried several of the food offerings at ABC Commissary at their Latin Street Party. The food was decent and live music is ALWAYS a plus. We caught the last showing of “What’s This? Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas Sing-Along” and it was really great too. I’m not even a huge fan of the movie, but the show was entertaining and well executed. Neither Toy Story Land nor Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge were part of the event although both were open. This was a baffling decision on Disney’s part. The two newest lands of the park, and both were given no party elements. We went to TSL and rode Slinky Dog Dash and that was the longest wait of our night at about 35 minutes.

The only non-character party event that we didn’t indulge in was the Jazzy Holidays at the Hollywood Brown Derby. After watching many reviews of this experience, we opted not to participate. It was a string of garland and some Dollar Tree string lights on the piano. That was the décor. That’s it. Apparently, the piano player was good, but didn’t really play many Christmas tunes and took frequent breaks. The food options weren’t overly appealing, so we passed. Other than that, we milked as much out of that party as possible plus rode a few rides, and purchased the one piece of merchandise, and we still can’t recommend it (in its current form that is).

We were both glad we experienced the holiday parties once, but was it worth the rather exorbitant price tag? I say no. Mileage will vary naturally, but if you don’t care about characters, the value just isn’t there. What do you think about the holiday offerings at WDW?