I love the spirit of Christmas. I may not have kids and be in my forties, but I love the festive cheer the season brings. It was for this reason I was so excited to be going to ‘Wishmas’. Billed as an all-age fantastical immersive Christmas experience, I was all over it.
Sadly, Wishmas was not my Christmas wish.
From the very start, I felt awkward: I did not have a child. This is the sort of experience where you are expected to have a child, the younger the better, because otherwise you not only feel like an imposter, but also the parents will look at you strangely. If they don’t, you will feel like they do.
This is because all of the activities – and that’s a term I use loosely – have been based on the skills a three-year old would have. From spinning a giant spongy cog to placing a shape in a gap, that’s about as thrilling as this experience gets.
You need a lot of imagination to make this work, and even then, I don’t think it’s fair to ask kids to be that creative. There are five rooms. The first is the wish room where we are taught robins carry our wishes in red balls, which is why the robin’s breast is red. It’s a sweet sentiment, along with the idea ‘no wish is forgotten’, but that’s about as good as this gets.
The next ‘rooms’ are playschool executions of a wish train, a time room, a reindeer something and then Santa and his helper. I would say it was fun, but I can’t lie, it was awful. I couldn’t wait to leave and for this festive torture to be over.
Once out of the sixty-minute ‘fantastical adventure’ we then got to make a bauble (this costs extra), which basically meant stuffing random bits into a plastic bauble as quickly as possible because the room was so busy.
When you exit the ‘experience’ you are faced with a festive marketplace which really smacks of the crass commercialism of Christmas, which is really what this experience felt like. Overpriced, over-promised, underwhelming and seriously lacking in festive finesse, this was not one for me.
Reviewer: Samantha Collett
Reviewed: 21st November 2023
North West End UK Rating:
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