Santa’s Village in Jefferson, NH: World’s Most Charming Theme Park

Travel dates: July 2021

When you’re only going to have one day of good weather in the White Mountains, you go see Santa.

Anyway, that’s what we decided when we visited New Hampshire last summer, and it was a great call. Santa’s Village is utterly charming, not to mention clean and well run. And fun for all ages! Well. It was the most fun for our then 8 year old, who is the target audience, but the older kids were very good sports about coming along, and they had a good time, too…though they were perhaps not as enchanted as Abe was.

The whole park is very well themed (the idea is that it’s Santa’s summer home), with Christmas music playing all over the place and fun touches like these penguin trash cans. The rides are geared toward kids, but some of them are exciting enough to interest teens as well. We were there on a weekday in July, with very pleasant, though sometimes overcast, weather (temps in the low 70s, I believe), and there were short waits for most of the rides most of the day, although the park started to feel more crowded by late morning/early afternoon. Some of the rides were closed in the morning and open in the afternoon and vice versa; I imagine this was because they didn’t have enough staff to keep all the rides open at the same time; it made navigating a little more tricky since we had to do some backtracking to hit everything, but it’s a fairly small park so it wasn’t a big deal.

A few thoughts and tips:

*As with most popular tourist sites, the best thing to do is to get there early. We got there right at opening, which meant we had a couple of quiet hours before the crowds started to build.

*Our strategy was to head to an area fairly far away from the entrance right away and start there, but in retrospect we’d have picked a couple of things where lines were likely to build later in the day and knock those out first. Like if you want to ride the Ferris wheel, I’d do that first; Dave and the kids waited in line for it for FOREVER later in the day.

*There’s standard theme park food, but they do allow outside food. We bought lunch there, but the food lines wound up being second only to the Ferris wheel, so that we wished we’d brought sandwiches instead and just bought some standard theme park snacks like fried dough:

*Make sure to stop by Elf University to get a card where you can punch out all the letters of the alphabet at the little elf statues that are all over the park (and turn it in for a prize at the end). Abe loved this (and made sure his brothers got turns):

*Also stop by the Blacksmith Shop for a free ring made out of a nail. We’re big fans of free souvenirs!

*Feeding reindeer was another very big highlight (and another place that gets crowded later in the day):

*Even though it’s kind of a big deal, we didn’t make it to Santa’s house to visit the big man himself. We put it off until toward the end of the day, and by then the line was long and everyone was pretty tired and ready to go. They also weren’t doing any of the usual live shows because of covid. But we did see the sort of odd light show that was running. It was just a stage with Christmas trees with lights coordinated with music:

*There’s also a waterpark that we didn’t make it to, but people were definitely going even though it wasn’t a hot day.

*We stayed around 6 hours, which was plenty of time to ride everything we wanted and repeat some favorites. If there had been a full schedule of shows that we wanted to see, or if we had done the waterpark, it might have been a little tight.

We picked Santa’s Village over the cog railway at Mount Washington as our big splurge for the White Mountains, and I have no regrets. We definitely won’t make it back to the area before Abe is too old to really get into it, and he had such an amazing time. It’s hard being the little kid trailing behind much older siblings. He hasn’t had the chance to do all the stuff they did, like go to a million children’s museums and whatnot, so I’m glad we spent this one day doing something that was all for him. And I’m glad my big kids had excellent attitudes about being dragged along.

Other moments of holiday merriment and impressive theming:

The kids were very enamored of the one dark ride, with a Dickens’ A Christmas Carol theme. You get to shoot humbugs as you go through to score points:

Next up: more White Mountains, only soggier.

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