It's the holiday season! Many associate the Christmas holiday with cozying up by the fire, but for me, there's no better way to spend Christmas Day than in a tropical location (as the late Jimmy Buffet sang, hang your stocking on a coconut tree). My family, a.k.a. the Shinglebells, set sail on our first Christmas Cruise in 2009 (when I was 18, and my sister, Rachel, was 16 years old), and we had such a wonderful experience that we have cruised over Christmas every year since (with the exception of 2020 for obvious reasons).

Over the past (almost) fifteen years of Christmas Cruising, we've spent the holiday on five different cruise lines (Royal Caribbean, Carnival, Norwegian, Princess, and Celebrity), on small and large ships (ranging in size from the 670-passenger Pacific Princess to the mega-ship Harmony of the Seas) to a variety of warm-weather ports of call. There's nowhere I'd rather spend the Christmas holiday than out at sea. I hope that I can share my experiences so that you can determine if cruising over the holiday would be a good fit for your family!

Shinglebells Christmas on Royal Caribbean Adventure of the Seas, 2011

I've cruised over Christmas for nearly half of my life, so cruising definitely feels like Christmas to me. However, whether or not it would feel like Christmas on a cruise ship was a question that we had before our first Christmas Cruise. Each cruise lines celebrate the holiday differently, but all cruise lines that I've sailed on over Christmas have decorated the ship and include special holiday programming.

Our sailing on the Celebrity Summit was our first ever Christmas Cruise with Aaron's parents. It was also Aaron's parents' first ever cruise. We wanted to give them a taste of cruising with a 5-day itinerary. Aaron's parents are Catholic and wanted to attend Catholic Mass on Christmas, so we chose to sail with Celebrity because it is one of a few cruise lines that guarantees a Catholic Priest on its Christmas sailings.

This was also my first cruise on Celebrity. I am a Diamond Crown & Anchor Club Member on Royal Caribbean Cruise Line, and I was excited to sail on RCCL's "more sophisticated" sister line. Also, Celebrity matched my Diamond status as Elite Captain's Club, so I was able to experience some loyalty perks, despite this being my first Celebrity cruise.

The rating system is based on ten nine (you'll see) components of a cruise vacation which I find important - itinerary, ship novelties, pools, activities, dining, bars and lounges, service, design and aesthetics, and stateroom.

I've found that Glad I Did/Wish I did posts are a great way to quickly share with others what worked and what didn't on our cruise. They're also really helpful to refer back to over the years when preparing for our next cruise.

Glad I did NOT bid on a Stateroom Upgrade

I was very tempted to bid on a stateroom upgrade. There were Concierge Class upgrade bids starting at $100 per person. However, after some research on the Concierge Class, I learned that there wasn't a big incentive to upgrade to Concierge Class on the Celebrity Millennium Series ships. The stateroom is no larger than a standard stateroom. The only extra features are a Celebrity embossed key holder and an "Exclusive Welcome Aboard Concierge Class Lunch" (we actually would have enjoyed that lunch). Also, I had selected a neighboring stateroom with Aaron's parents. I would have bid to upgrade Aaron's parents as well, but there was no guarantee that our rooms would still be next to one another, and there was also a risk that one stateroom would get upgraded while the other would not. It's a risk that I've taken with my family in the past, but give that it was Aaron's parents first cruise, I didn't want to accidentally get our staterooms moved to opposite ends of the ship.

 Sad day - departure day! On December 27, we arrived back in Miami.

There was a thick fog over Biscayne Bay.


We were once again docked next to the Scarlet Lady which was also sailing 5-night voyages.

Our fifth and final day of the cruise was at sea. Unfortunately, it was another gloomy day - so much for hanging out by the pool!

We went to lunch in the Cosmopolitan Dining Room at noon. It was only open for lunch from 12:00 - 1:30 PM.

I realized that this was a good opportunity to get photos of the dining room. Our table was on the fifth floor (upper dining room level), so we didn't have a good view of the center of the dining room.

I think the dining room looks much better during the day than at night, but perhaps that's only because we were seated on the dimly lit upper level.

Good morning, it's Christmaaaaaassss!!!

Unfortunately, Aaron's mom still wasn't feeling so well, so she wasn't able to go to Catholic Mass at 8:00 AM in the theater with Father Gallagher. Aaron's dad said that it was a complete Catholic Mass with communion, and there were about 100 people in attendance.

We ate breakfast that morning at Ocean View Cafe and sat outside where the Sunset Bar is. We had a lovely table in the corner, but while we were eating breakfast, this large family decided to start taking photos on the rail behind me and kept switching out people in the photos... all the women, all the kids, this family, that family... they were right behind my chair, and there's no way I wasn't stuffing my face with eggs in their family photos.

Originally, I booked the "Queen Elizabeth II Royal Botanical Park & Pedro St. James" excursion through Celebrity. We were going to visit the botanical park and gardens, then enjoy an afternoon tea service at the Great House. It sounded like the perfect excursion for our group.

Day 3 of our cruise was Christmas Eve. We arrived in Cozumel bright (errr cloudy) and early at 7:00 AM. We docked at the International Pier with the Adventure of the Seas.

We sailed on Adventure of the Seas for our second Shinglebells Christmas Cruise. It's also the first cruise that I blogged about!


We headed to the Cosmopolitan Dining Room for breakfast as soon as it opened at 7:30 and were greeted by a friendly face - Dipo, our server at dinner! He sat us at a table by the window in his section.

On our first sea day, we woke up to cloudy, drizzly weather.

We had planned to eat breakfast in the dining room at 9:30, but realized too late that we had confused the breakfast time with the Ocean View Cafe. The dining room was only open for breakfast from 7:30 AM to 9:00 AM. Ocean View Cafe was open for breakfast from 6:30 AM to 11:00 AM (includes "continental breakfast," "breakfast buffet," and "late breakfast").

So back to the buffet we went.

Rise and shine, it's Embarkation Day!

I should listen to my own advise because I didn't allow enough time to get my camera gear ready to go and found myself rushing to repack my bag. It's always a bit awkward because the things in my backpack for the plane aren't the same thing I want in my backpack to board the ship. So I try to shuffle things around, and nothing fits quite right.

I got an UberXL to take us from the hotel to the cruise terminal ($14). If you're a party of four people with suitcases, make sure to order an UberXL rather than an UberX so that there is room for your luggage. This is because a vehicle just needs the third seat fold-down option to be considered XL, so if you need to put suitcases in the trunk, you won't be able to use the third row seating in smaller SUVs. If you have more than four people and luggage, you'll want to order two separate UberXs.

Ahoy! It's time for another Christmas Cruise.... and New Year's cruise review!

This year's Christmas/New Year's vacation was elaborate in both planning and executions, so in order to set the stage, I'm dedicating an entire post to the story of how our Christmas Cruise - WDW - NYE Cruise vacation came to be.

If you've been following the blog for awhile now, you probably know that it is Shinglebell family tradition to cruise over Christmas. From 2009 to 2019, my sister Rachel and our parents (a.k.a. Stove and Judy) would meet together and set sail to spend the holiday at sea. However, we introduced our boyfriends into the mix, and Christmases became more complicated. Back in 2020, Rachel and I came to the conclusion that we could alternate Christmases every-other-year with our family and our boyfriends' families. Since the cruising industry was not yet open in 2020, Rachel and I offered the first year to our boyfriends' families with the hope that cruising would return by 2021 in time for a Christmas cruise. And it did! (See my Trip Report for our 2021 Christmas on NCL Encore.)