What’s better than one annual event?

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Here’s another trivia note for you. Epcot's International Flower & Garden Festival pre-dates its more storied fall sibling by two years. It’s true. In 1994, Disney introduced this triumph in botany. Each March, cast members prune vegetation until it looks strikingly similar to scenes and characters from Disney movies. If you love taking pictures at Walt Disney World, the International Flower & Garden Festival is a shutterbug’s dream come true.

Over time, park planners realized that they could combine the best parts of the fall event in the spring one. Today, the flower exhibition includes 13 booths that Disney calls Outdoor Kitchens. They’re basically the same food and wine booths that you’d see at the World Showcase in September. It’s a way for Disney to entice theme park tourists to visit at a different time of the year.

Two is better than one, but four is better than two

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In recent years, Disney has (somewhat shamelessly) added another seasonal event. Disney has always done the holidays right, decorating all their theme parks and resorts in spectacular fashion. Nobody shows yuletide joy like Team Mickey. What changed with the introduction of Holidays Around the World at Epcot is that they monetized the joy of the season by merging it with the established concepts of The Epcot International Food & Wine.

Now, you get all the holiday lights of December plus some decadent Christmas desserts. For more than a month, foods like the Caramel Kiss, a powerful combination of Werther’s caramel and a hot spiced wine, are available at food booths. Meals are on sale, too. The American pop-up stand fittingly offers turkey with stuffing and cranberry sauce, a holiday tradition. Hungry visitors seeking more international flavors can enjoy duck confit or shredded beef tamale. The latter dish is a staple of the Feast of Three Kings, a Spanish tradition on Three Kings Day.

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While an optimist would view Holidays Around the World as a more official Epcot celebration of a holiday it already embraced, a realist has a differing point of view. Disney has effectively added another several weeks of World Showcase food booths to an event that they’d already made the longest ever in terms of days of operation. Any differing opinions on the subject fell apart with the introduction of the previously mentioned Epcot® International Festival of the Arts. It’s yet another temporary exhibition that celebrates different cultures around the world. And it does this by offering more food booths.

On weekends in January and February, Epcot’s World Showcase once again features unique foods of the world. Since this event isn’t tethered to any holidays or specific themes, the various menus are much more open-ended in style. The only consistent element is that each dish is a celebration of the arts, meaning that they’re all gorgeous in appearance. During this exhibition, theme park tourists are encouraged to eat with their eyes prior to chowing down on the actual food.

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From the Disney perspective, however, what matters isn’t the food. Epcot now hosts four different exhibitions each year. In 2017, they’ll total 225 days worth of “special events” out of 365 possible days. Epcot has reached a point where more than 61 percent of the time, they have food booths open to the public.

The popularity of the Epcot International Food & Wine Festival, a gambit that had no realistic expectation of succeeding, has fundamentally altered the nature of the World Showcase. This one event has changed the way that potential Disney visitors perceive the back half of Epcot. It’s now precisely the living, breathing entity that Walt Disney envisioned. Well, it is 61 percent of the time. That’s why we shouldn’t feel surprise each time Disney announces yet another Food & Wine-esque month long exhibition.