Weather can't be any better, but get ready to pay premium price. Beginning or mid December (before Christmas) is a lot cheaper.

Ditto Spur's comment. Have done Aruba/Spice Islands both early in the month and December in the new year. Same great weather, less than 1/2 the price the first 2 weeks in December, though.

Do be aware that ports are much more crowded too.

Good point, Jacketwatch. Which reminds me the number of kids you can expect onboard more than triples during the holidays vs. earlier in the month.

www.weather2travel.com Clmate guides

some rain in early Dec when I was there tends to taper off

later in the month... Jan lots better...

Have fun,

To amplify a bit we had a port stop in St. Maarten in the summer on the AOS and with two cruise ships in port as well a a Dutch warship BTW the roads were clogged with traffic. In high season our cab driver said sometime 4-5 ships are in port on the same day. Oh well its better than being at home I suppose.

Southern Caribbean is the best destination for December. We had great weather, sunny, warm but not too hot, water temperatures were warm for swimming, not like the Bahamas or Florida where it is usually colder in late December.

There is the risk of delays from US or Canadian airports from snow storms and holiday traffic. It is advisable to go to San Juan at least a day before cruising day.

http://bramptontravellers.blogspot.com/2010/01/puerto-rico-and-southern-caribbean.html

Happy Travels

Thanks everyone for your help. I am a teacher and have always traveled over spring break. This will be our first time doing a cruise in December. We are taking our two teenage nieces with us (one from my side of the family and one from my husband's side of the family), and have to work around 3 school schedules. There are some conflicts over spring break so we opted for Christmas since we are all out of school at the same time. It will definitely be a nice chunk of money, but as long as our ship is beautiful and the weather is sunny and warm then it will be worth it.

We were on the Ruby Princess Dec 12-19 in 2010 and were unable to make our Bahamas stop (Princess' private island) due to high seas and bad weather. The stops in St. Thomas, St. Maarten and Turks/Caicos were fine but there was rain and temps were in high 70's, not always beach weather. Granted this has been a particularly brutal winter, but we won't be doing Caribbean again in December. With 2 kids (one a teacher and one a student), spring break is always bad for us because of disparate vacation times. We are thinking of Panama Canal in December, as that is MUCH farther south. No easy answer.

Last 4 times we were in Grand Cayman in Dec/Jan it was not very warm. Had to purchase hoodies for the whole family..St. Thomas was very windy and cool the Christmas before last. The whole winter was not great and a cruise in Feb. had such high seas we couldn't get off ship in Virgin Gorda or Tortola. Some times there are 8 ships in St. Thomas and that is not good except for the merchants. Will be there in 2 weeks and will only go into Charlotte Amalia perhaps once and only on a day when there are fewer ships. "It ain't what it used to be!!!"

Been to Grand Cayman on 3 separate crusies, fianlly landed ashore the last try. Maybe third time the charm?

Being a tender port you will always run the chance of not getting ashore. I didn't think the wave was big but I guess it is bad enough not to tender. Even on the time we landed ashore, we tedner to the alternate pier which is away from the down town core and cost $5 cab fare to get into town.

We failed to make land-ho in January and December. The final time was mid November.

Well, since Grand Cayman is usually not considered to be in the "southern Caribbean" shouldn't be any problem then.

While technically correct in fact several southern Carib. cruises do have stops in GC as well as other ports not that far south such as the Virgin islands and the DR as well.