Happy Thanksgiving, World Travelers! We spent our holiday searching the park for new things to bring to you, plus finding a bit of holiday cheer along the way. Let’s get started!
When we arrived, we noticed right away that preparations were underway across the park for the upcoming International Festival of the Holidays, which opens today. The banners announcing the Festival have been installed at the entrance of the park, and we can’t wait to experience all the new food and entertainment!
We checked in at Pin Traders and found a whole rack of new 2021 merchandise, including pins, lanyards, and a lanyard pouch.
While we there we found a truly impressive haul of new pins from the Celebrating Twenty Years of Disney Pins online pin trading event, plus the MagicBand associated with the event. This Limited Edition pin set may even give us a sneak peek at Mickey’s 50th anniversary outfit!
On our way to the rest of the park, we saw that the Main Entrance East Restrooms have been opened for guests. These restrooms have been renovated with the interiors updated with new fixtures and stalls, as well as repainted.
At Mouse Gear we found his new tumbler which is sure to make you scream with delight. This Monsters, Inc. inspired piece is based off of the canisters from the film that contain children’s screams, and when you take the lid off of this tumbler, it actually screams! This tumbler retails for $24.99.
While searching for new merchandise we also found this white Christmas 25-day countdown calendar. This piece is available at World Traveler for $49.99.
Though not new, the “Frohes Fest” and “Frohliche Weihnachten” merchandise has been brought back for this holiday season, and we are loving these festive looks!
We checked in on the construction, or rather destruction, progress on the former location of Future World East. We could see further into the building today, and could see that interior walls have been demolished, as well as the exterior walls.
The sign at the Family Play Zone on the other side of the building has been removed. It hasn’t matched the theming of the play equipment in the area for some time, but it was surprising to see the whole sign removed.
At the France Pavilion expansion, the hand-painted mural is coming along, with more detail added along the bottom. We can’t wait to see what this will look like when it’s completed!
Tokyo Dining has reopened for the Thanksgiving weekend, with no reservations required. Walk-up wait list is the only way to dine here for the next two days, but we’re excited to see them open, even if only for a short time.
The seasonal favorite ice cream macaron sandwich has returned to L’Artisan des Glaces. This is a peppermint ice cream sandwich in between two festively colored macarons. We love the pumpkin spice ice cream sandwich, but we think this might be our favorite!
We found a few Thanksgiving Day exclusive food items at Sunshine Seasons in The Land Pavilion today. We love that the cupcake included a mini pie on top!
Speaking of food, we found food from the International Festival of the Holidays available today at Refreshment Port, including the Turkey Poutine. We can tell you that it’s delicious!
A lot of the menus for the festival food booths were out today.
All of the booths that aren’t being transformed from the International Food & Wine Festival to the International Festival of the Holidays have been removed except for these two. The Waffles booth and the Earth Eats booth are both still in the park and appear unchanged from their Food & Wine forms. We’ll see what state they’re in tomorrow!
With the Festival of the Holidays almost here in the park, we noticed the Festival has already arrived in the tiny town in the model train village near the Germany Pavilion. Tiny banners for the Festival of the Holidays now decorate the streets in the town.
While walking World Showcase, we noticed that there’s a new scavenger hunt character in town, and we think this one’s worth melting for. Olaf is the focus of this festival’s scavenger hunt, and while the map isn’t available until the festival officially opens, we think we may have found him in every pavilion around World Showcase already. It certainly made for a fun day!
We had a great day at EPCOT, and we hope you had a wonderful holiday, and a great time coming along with us. Have a magical day!