Sleigh Ride (on water and out of Los Angeles).

Our friends at Disney Cruise Line are certainly getting into the Christmas spirit this season as evident by the various Christmas decorations that have gone up for passengers perusal as they sail during the holidays.

Some of those decorations are larger than life, just like the ships! On each of the ships, you’ll find large Christmas trees and garland galore in the entry halls. Further deep inside the ships, you’ll find a uniquely huge gingerbread house! These gingerbread houses are all created on board by the ship’s talented culinary team and contains approximately 650 pounds of gingerbread dough, 5,250 gingerbread bricks, 220 pounds of icing, and all that extra candy and edibles to decorate the assembled house (which takes about 320 hours to build!).

It’s certainly a must-see and can’t-miss Christmas display if you’re able to sail on Disney Cruise Line this holiday season, but for many of us (specifically those who live on the U.S. west coast including us here at DE) we might not have that opportunity in the future…

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Sadly this past week, Disney Cruise Line announced that they will be leaving Los Angeles as a home port beginning 2014, leaving many potential cruisers having to travel across the country to meet their ships…which is an additional cost to an already sorta-expensive adventure at sea.

The reasons for pulling out aren’t clear, but we got a quote from Disney Cruise Line saying…

We’re quite sad that Disney Cruise Line has decided to do this as we were going to report and keep up with the floating Disney Park as it made its way around the world from a port that was just outside our door. We know many of you have expressed this sadness as well, but here’s hoping that we can all make it aboard one day.

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Have any of you been on a Disney Cruise before? Has anybody left from the Los Angeles port before? Tell us about your experiences in the comments.