EPCOT Festival of the Holidays 2026: Dates, Food, Shows and Where to Eat

The EPCOT International Festival of the Holidays runs November 27 through December 30, 2026. It comes with regular EPCOT admission: there is no festival ticket, and you pay for food and drinks as you go. Disney has confirmed the dates, the Candlelight Processional, the storytellers and the shows. It has not yet posted the 2026 Holiday Kitchens menus or the Cookie Stroll cookies.

Every festival guide lists the booths. This one also answers the question they skip: can you still get dinner? On November 10 we counted which EPCOT restaurants had a dinner table open on each of the 34 festival nights. For two people, Le Cellier had one night, Space 220 had ten, and the stretch from December 3 to 12 was tighter than Christmas week.

In this guide

• Festival dates and what it costs
• Do you need tickets?
• Holiday Kitchens and menus
• Holiday Cookie Stroll
• Candlelight Processional
• Storytellers, Santa and shows
• Where to eat: dinner availability by restaurant
• The hardest nights
• Fireworks dining during the festival
• If your restaurant is full

EPCOT Festival of the Holidays 2026 dates

The festival starts the day after Thanksgiving and ends the day before New Year's Eve. If your trip includes November 26, our Thanksgiving dinner at Disney World guide has that day; for December 31, see New Year's Eve at Disney World.

Do you need tickets for the Festival of the Holidays?

No. Disney sells no ticket for the festival. Anyone with EPCOT admission for the day can walk the Holiday Kitchens, watch the storytellers and see the Candlelight Processional from standby.

Three things do cost extra:

• Food and drinks at the Holiday Kitchens, bought item by item.
• The scavenger hunt map for Olaf's Holiday Tradition Expedition. TouringPlans lists it at $11.99 before tax.
• A guaranteed seat at the Candlelight Processional, which comes only with a dining package ($43 to $109 per adult).

Holiday Kitchens: what Disney has confirmed for 2026

Holiday Kitchens are the festival's food booths, each serving small plates and drinks tied to a holiday tradition. Disney had not posted the 2026 kitchens or menus as of November 10, 2026. Its Holiday Kitchens page says to check back soon, and the Disney Parks Blog's Walt Disney World holiday food guide of October 26 says a separate guide for this festival is still to come.

What Disney's page does show is a short list of favourites from 2025, with a note that offerings may change:

Two rules from Disney's page that will apply whatever the menus are: alcohol is served only to guests 21 and older with valid ID, and there is a limit of two drinks per ID.

We will add the full kitchen list and menus here the day Disney posts them.

Holiday Cookie Stroll 2026

The Holiday Cookie Stroll returns. Disney's festival page describes it as cookies around the park with a treat at the end. As BlogMickey and TouringPlans describe the rules for 2026: buy five qualifying cookies at participating Holiday Kitchens, collect a stamp for each in your Festival Passport, and trade the finished passport for a completer treat.

Disney has not published the 2026 cookies, the participating kitchens or the completer treat.

Candlelight Processional

The Candlelight Processional is the festival's main show: a celebrity narrator reads the Christmas story with a massed choir, a 50-piece orchestra, herald trumpets and the Voices of Liberty. It plays every night of the festival at 4:45 PM, 6:30 PM and 8:00 PM at the America Gardens Theatre.

Fifteen narrators share the run, from Jordan Fisher on opening weekend to Eva Longoria on the last three nights. Watching is included with admission, but the seats are first come, first served unless you hold a dining package.

The packages are the hardest booking of the festival. When we counted on November 10, no package time was open for a party of two on any night from November 27 to December 25, and cancelled seats that came back were gone again in a median of seven minutes. December 26 to 30 was wide open.

The narrator schedule, all 16 package prices and the night-by-night numbers are in our Candlelight Processional 2026 guide. To be told when a package seat reopens on your night, set an alert on the Candlelight Processional Dining Package page.

Storytellers, Santa and shows

Holiday storytellers

Disney lists ten storyteller acts around World Showcase. TouringPlans puts each at about 15 minutes, several times a day. Times are in the My Disney Experience app.

Santa and characters

• Santa Claus meets guests at CommuniCore Hall daily through December 24.
• Goofy as Santa is at The Odyssey every day of the festival, November 27 to December 30.

Shows and things to do

• JOYFUL! A Celebration of the Season. Gospel, R&B and holiday songs for Christmas and Kwanzaa, daily at the CommuniCore Plaza Stage.
• Living with the Land: Glimmering Greenhouses. The boat ride's greenhouses are strung with lights for the season.
• Olaf's Holiday Tradition Expedition Scavenger Hunt. Find the holiday traditions Olaf has lost around World Showcase. One prize per map.
• Gingerbread Spaceship Earth, Festive Fragrances and the Dickens Carolers. BlogMickey's report of Disney's June announcement adds a gingerbread Spaceship Earth with a Celebration Countdown every 15 minutes, a walk of holiday scents near Imagination!, and the Voices of Liberty singing as Dickens Carolers.

Where to eat: dinner availability during the festival

Holiday Kitchens are snacks. A sit-down dinner, especially one timed before a Candlelight show or the fireworks, needs a reservation.

This is our count from November 10, 2026 at 11:41 PM Eastern, across the 21 EPCOT table-service restaurants and lounges we track. It shows how many of the 34 festival nights had at least one dinner time (4:00 PM or later) open.

What the table says:

• Le Cellier is close to gone. One dinner time for two on one night, December 13. For four, a handful of times on December 13, 23, 26 and 27.
• Space 220 Restaurant has dinner for two only from December 20 on. Nothing was open for two on the first 23 nights. A party of four had 30 nights to choose from.
• Party size changes everything at four restaurants. Rose & Crown had no dinner for two on any festival night and dinner for four on all 34. Garden Grill went from 7 nights to 33, Spice Road Table from 17 to 34, and Via Napoli from 18 to 33. If you are two people travelling with another couple, search as four.
• Five restaurants were open every night for both sizes: Coral Reef, Chefs de France, La Creperie de Paris, Nine Dragons and Shiki-Sai. These are the ones you can still book at leisure.
• Rose & Crown closes from January 11, 2027 for planned maintenance, so this is its last festival before the closure.

The hardest nights for an EPCOT dinner

Same count, by week: how many of the 21 restaurants had a dinner time open on a given night.

For two people, the tightest stretch is December 3 to 12, not Christmas week. On each of those ten nights only 8 or 9 of the 21 restaurants had a dinner time, and December 7, 8 and 9 were the lowest at 8. From December 18 on, 15 or more had one every night.

New Year's Eve is a different story. The festival ends on December 30. On December 31, one of the 21 restaurants had a dinner time. Our New Year's Eve guide covers that night park by park.

These counts move. They are a picture of one moment, and tables open and close all day as people change plans. Each restaurant's page above shows its calendar as it stands now.

Fireworks dining during the festival

We track four ways to book dinner with a view of EPCOT's fireworks show, Luminous The Symphony of Us. For the 34 festival nights, on November 10:

All of them are compared on our fireworks dining page.

If your restaurant is full

A full calendar in November is not the final answer. People cancel, and those tables go back on sale at once. In the six days before our count, Le Cellier put 15 dinner times for two back on sale across the festival nights, and Space 220 Restaurant 26. At Le Cellier, half of them were booked again within 31 minutes.

That is too fast to catch by checking now and then, and it is what PixieWire is for. A dining alert watches the restaurant, date, party size and time you choose, and sends an email and an app notification when a table opens, with a link to book it on Disney's site. We never book for you and never touch your Disney account.

1. Open the restaurant's page from the table above and pick your date.
2. Choose "Watch this table".
3. Book with Disney when the alert arrives.

Alerts are the paid part of PixieWire: $4.99 for one watch you can re-point for a year, texts from $9.99, and a Trip Pass with 25 alerts for $24.99. Nothing renews. See Dining Alerts for the passes, or the hardest restaurants to book to see where one is worth it.

More for the season

• Christmas at Disney World 2026: every event in every park, with dates.
• Candlelight Processional 2026: narrators, package prices and open nights.
• Christmas Day at Disney World 2026: which restaurants have dinner on December 24 and 25.
• Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party 2026 and Disney Jollywood Nights 2026: the two ticketed parties.
• After the holidays, the same theatre hosts the Disney on Broadway Concert Series 2027 from January 15.

How this guide was checked

• Dates, shows, storytellers, Santa: Disney's festival page and festival entertainment page, read November 10, 2026.
• Holiday Kitchens: Disney's Holiday Kitchens page, which showed 2025 favourites and no 2026 menus on November 10, and the Disney Parks Blog holiday food guide of October 26.
• Cookie Stroll rules, scavenger hunt price and the June announcement: BlogMickey and TouringPlans.
• Restaurant and package counts: PixieWire's availability tracking, counted November 10, 2026. The method is on our how we measure availability page.

We re-count the restaurant tables weekly until December 30 and add the menus when Disney publishes them.