This holiday season, Disney’s Grand Floridian is dressed up and ready for Christmas once again, complete with a new lobby bar and a central Christmas tree anchoring the décor. After a months-long renovation, the resort is back in the festive spirit. Yet with the return of holiday decorations comes a bittersweet question: will the iconic Grand Floridian gingerbread house make its return in 2026?
What’s New: Lobby Refresh & Holiday Ambience
In 2025, Grand Floridian underwent a major lobby makeover. The highlight of the transformation is the new birdcage-inspired lobby bar, appropriately named The Perch, which opened in November 2025. The redesign also brought updated carpet, new furniture, refreshed staircases, and a reimagined front desk area. By late 2025, construction walls came down and many of the changes were revealed.
With the lobby renovation substantially complete, Grand Floridian has resumed its holiday décor this year; including a large Christmas tree at the center of the lobby and festive decorations throughout the public areas.
The tree is filled with warm yellow christmas lights and Victorian elegance-inspired ornaments and decorations, including ribbons and bows, swans, white birdcages, bouquets of flowers and baubles that match the lobby’s new color palette.
The Gingerbread House: Still Missing This Year
Despite the festive look, the resort hit a snag: the famous Grand Floridian gingerbread house did not return for 2025’s holiday season. Disney confirmed that because of the lobby renovation, including the space now occupied by the new bar, there simply wasn’t room to build the life-sized gingerbread structure or operate the usual gingerbread shop inside it.
— 2024 Gingerbread House
For many, the gingerbread house is a major holiday tradition at Walt Disney World, complete with treat sales and photo opportunities. Its absence this year is a significant change. What will 2026 bring?
Now that the lobby renovation is finished, it seems reasonable to wonder whether the gingerbread house can return. Where would they put it? The central lobby is now occupied by The Perch and its surrounding furniture and décor – room that once helped accommodate the massive gingerbread structure, as well as queue space for photos and the treats counter.
The resort’s Christmas tree has always looked perfect at the center of the lobby. But as you can see, this year, it’s a rather tight with the new lobby bar right next to it:
Maybe they’ll rearrange the layout… they could place the Christmas tree to one side and free up space on the other by removing seating areas to house the gingerbread display. Another option might be a smaller-scale display, or perhaps a creative repositioning somewhere else in the resort.
That said, given how some classic elements have quietly disappeared from other parts of Disney World – such as sudden ride preshow removals or the long absence of the Castle Dream Lights – I admit I’m skeptical that the gingerbread house will return in its classic form, at least without a formal announcement.
This year’s Grand Floridian décor delivers plenty of seasonal atmosphere, from the refreshed lobby and new bar to the towering Christmas tree that anchors the space. 2025 is a gingerbread-free year for the resort since Disney originally said it would not return this holiday season. The big question now is simply where it will go in the newly reconfigured lobby in 2026. Whether Disney adjusts the layout, shifts the tree, or unveils an updated take on it all, we hope the resort’s bakery and installation team sare just taking a year off while they figure out how to reintroduce it into the resort’s new footprint. What do you think?
