EPCOT International Festival of the Holidays

A retelling of the Christmas story with a celebrity narrator, a fifty-piece orchestra, the Voices of Liberty and a mass choir, performed three times a night at the America Gardens Theatre throughout the festival. It is included with park admission on a standby basis, and the narrator changes nightly — Brendan Fraser narrated during the 2025 season.

No, but it is the only way to guarantee a seat. A dining package books a meal at a participating restaurant and includes reserved seating at a specific performance. Standby seating exists for every show and works on a weekday with a less famous narrator; on a December weekend with a well-known one it means queueing for hours.

Every EPCOT festival runs the same two activities, and knowing the pattern once saves working it out four times a year. The first is a food passport — here it is the Holiday Cookie Stroll.

Thirteen cookies are on the menu across World Showcase and CommuniCore Hall, but you only need any five of them to finish the card — a distinction worth knowing before anyone attempts all thirteen. You collect a stamp with each purchase and redeem the completed card for a prize.

The second is a character scavenger hunt, bought as a separate map, where you find one character hidden across the park. Neither is included: the passport costs whatever the food costs, and the hunt map is bought on its own. The Holidays hunt is Olaf's Holiday Tradition Expedition, finding Olaf across the park.

Two things worth going out of your way for, both missing from the printed passport during the 2025 season. Figment wears a holiday sweater on Journey Into Imagination and has a meet-and-greet in it, which the book does not mention at all. And the Germany pavilion runs Mika's Adventskalender, an interactive puppet show, which is likewise absent.

Working only from the passport, you would walk past both.

Santa Claus is at CommuniCore Hall, alongside the gingerbread Spaceship Earth, and guests write a wish card before going in. Santa Goofy is separate, in his sleigh at the Odyssey among the Christmas trees of the Glittering Grove. They are two different meets in two different places, and the queue for each is listed separately in My Disney Experience.

The booths are fewer and the food leans traditional, not experimental, but the festival has far more that is free: a storyteller in nearly every pavilion explaining how that country celebrates, the Candlelight Processional every night, and JOYFUL! It is also the more family-friendly of the two, where Food & Wine is aimed squarely at adults.

The first two weeks, before schools break up. From roughly 20 December EPCOT becomes one of the busiest places in Florida and the Candlelight Processional standby queue becomes impractical. Because this is the shortest festival — barely five weeks — and there is more to do than in any of the others, two days is a more realistic plan than one.