When I was ten years old, my parents decided that we would break from our Christmas traditions and go to Florida for the holidays.  It was a great experience for us, so I thought I’d share it, in case there are some parents out there that are considering something like this for next year.

We live in Nova Scotia, Canada, so this was a very different  for us not to have cold weather and snow on Christmas day.  We are also a family that likes their traditions, so we tried to do a modified version of some of our annual Christmas festivities.

Most importantly, I have a younger brother and sister, who were quite concerned that Santa might not find us in Florida but please reassure your children that somehow he did!  I wasn’t too sure what it would be like to have Christmas without a tree, so I had the idea that we should take some lights with us, and I used them to make the outline of a tree on the hotel wall.  We still had stockings and left a snack out for Santa.  On Christmas day, we went to the Magic Kingdom but instead of watching the parade on television we were going to be able to see it in person!  It didn’t take us long to figure out that we could watch the parade next year on t.v. and instead took advantage of the lack of line-ups as we went on Splash Mountain, over and over again.  Everybody else lined the streets to watch the parade.  We always have a turkey dinner on Christmas Day and we were bound and determined that this year should be no different.  We headed over to Epcot center and went to the Canadian Pavilion  and sure enough they were serving turkey dinner  

I remember that it was a very festive atmosphere as there were beautiful Christmas decorations everywhere, huge trees and Disney characters that all had special Christmas outfits on.  There were performances all over the parks where carols were being sung and my personal favorite, was that all of the Epcot country pavilions  had something about holiday traditions in their countries.  I think it is a wonderful place to take your children any time of year but Christmas was particularly interesting.  I am all about traveling for cultural experiences with your children, but even the commercialism that is Disney can teach your kids about the world around them.  At the very least, they will have a blast, remember the experience forever and have a great sleep that night!