Review: Elena of Avalor “Navidad”

The final Elena of the year and we find out if it’s any good.

Spoilers Below

Elena gets multiple invitations to celebrate Navidad. But she can’t make all of them. Thanks to some advice from Isabel, she suggests that everyone come to the park to celebrate together. Unfortunately, all of the different celebrations interrupt each other. The songs are too loud, the food cooking is causing too much smoke, Naomi brought a freaking boat. They just can’t seem to get along. So Elena suggests a parade instead. Doña Paloma, upset that her store’s sales aren’t through the roof, tells everyone that Elena will pick someone to lead the parade, making everyone buy bigger and better decorations from her store. Even that doesn’t work. Since everyone is competing for Elena’s favor, they end up destroying each other’s floats. Sadly, everyone returns to their own neighborhoods.

When Elena finds out what Doña Paloma did, she confronts the shopkeep. Doña Paloma confesses but she isn’t apologetic. She does offer anything in her store to Elena for free, as a Navidad gift. Elena chooses a guitar and begins a parradana, which is basically a huge caroling parade. The entire town joins in. Now that Elena reminded them the true meaning of Navidad, everyone happily celebrates the holiday together.

Once again, Elena of Avalor finds a different way to highlight the holiday season. I wish they would have found a way to spend a little more time on each individual celebration – like what sort of food were they cooking or why is there a piñata – but they only had so much time to work with. The episode was still fairly enjoyable, even though they had to gloss over the actual celebrations.