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The six hotels all vary in price and opulence, ranging from the stately Disneyland Hotel bridging the park entrance to the comparably basic (and overpriced) Santa Fe. It’s easy to strike a happy medium though, with our recommendations for winter being either Hotel New York, one of the closest hotels with a Central Park-style ice rink outside, or cheaper still, Sequoia Lodge, an imposing forest lodge-style hotel with stone walls and roaring fireplaces. It’s the perfect winter retreat.

Similarly, Davy Crockett Ranch is a 15-minute car journey away and is a nice retreat with a forest setting, although the accommodation is basic, self-catering and with no shuttle buses, awkard.

Inside the park, you may find the occasional ride closed due to winter maintenance, but as the Christmas season starts in earnest, it’s unlikely any of the major attractions will evade you.

France isn’t known for cooperative weather, but the park is designed around this inevitability with covered walkways running around pretty much all the park including the length of Main Street USA as well as from area-to-area. These are often marked on park maps.

Almost every queue is enclosed (Indiana Jones being a notable exception), and almost every major ride is under cover (Indiana Jones, once again, being an exception, along with Big Thunder Mountain). Weather-wise, it takes extraordinarily bad weather to close Disney’s rides, and that includes snow.

Disney’s Christmas season is about four-weeks long running from the beginning of December until, predictably, the end. Unsurprisingly, if you’re going for the rides, the first half of December strikes that balance of having the Christmas atmosphere without the crowds. The second half of December becomes more festive, but at the cost of short queue times which can get unbearable.

In terms of extra Christmas entertainment, Main Street USA is tastefully decorated for Christmas, although not with quite as much splendour as when the archways festooned with white Christmas lights ran the length of Main Street. There’s also the obligatory parade as well as mainly family-orientated extras.

The atmosphere is typical Disney schmaltz, and the first half of December is possibly the best time to enjoy Disneyland Paris assuming that the weather isn’t too bad.

Also, thanks to the on-site RENR station, it is easy to catch a train into the centre of Paris for that little bit of j'aime a se quois where you can trample the tourist trail.

Tivoli Gardens

Nowhere does Christmas like Tivoli Gardens. Nowhere. While Disneyland Paris caters to the more contemporary clichés of Christmas, at Tivoli Gardens it is full of all the charismatic charm that Christmas should be all about.

Lights trim the edges of every building, fire buckets are magnetic in their abilities to draw a crowd of people to warm themselves up by, while mulled wine warms up what the fire buckets can’t.

While Disney can manufacture magic and Alton Towers can tell you over and over again that they are magic, Tivoli Gardens truly is. With the park decorated as if a scene from a snow globe, you get a real taste of culture and character without even having to leave the park.

If to you the prospect of closed season openings conjure up pictures of desolate parks with leaves blowing across empty pathways and most rides inoperable due to the cold weather, then you really have to experience an evening or two at Tivoli Gardens.

Being a city centre park, you can expect throngs of locals visiting the park to look at the illuminations, to browse the Christmas market and to enjoy a meal in the park’s many sit-down restaurants.

The prospect of trading body-heat in a park rammed with people sounds a miserable prospect, no? Well no. It is the park being busy that makes Tivoli so magical, especially as most rides are a walk on – many people visit just for the food, the drink and the markets. Continues...