Holiday Weekend Hockey Tournaments 2026-27: Thanksgiving, Christmas, MLK and Presidents' Day
The long weekends are where travel hockey piles up. Four of them carry most of the season's away tournaments, and they fill in a different order than families expect: the holiday with the fewest listings is the one that sells out first.
The four weekends, and what counts
A tournament is "a holiday tournament" if any game day falls inside the weekend's window. That matters more than it sounds. A Thursday-to-Sunday showcase and a Friday-to-Sunday weekender both count for Thanksgiving, and so does a four-day event that starts the Wednesday before. The windows we use:
- Thanksgiving 2026: Wednesday, November 25 through Sunday, November 29.
- Christmas and New Year: Saturday, December 26, 2026 through Sunday, January 3, 2027.
- MLK weekend 2027: Friday, January 15 through Monday, January 18.
- Presidents' Day 2027: Friday, February 12 through Monday, February 15.
As of mid-November 2026 the counts on Tourney Hunter were roughly 130 for Thanksgiving, 125 for the Christmas break, 200 for MLK and 165 for Presidents' Day. The winter weekends are bigger because the whole continent is in season; Thanksgiving is smaller and the southern and western rinks lean on it harder.
Each weekend has its own page, updated nightly: Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year, MLK and Presidents' Day. Every one can be narrowed to a state.
Thanksgiving: book the hotel before the tournament
Thanksgiving tournaments are the hardest to plan around because the rest of the family has plans too. Two things to know. First, a surprising share of them are Friday-to-Sunday, which leaves Thursday for dinner at home if the drive is short. Second, hotel availability is the real constraint that weekend, not ice. If the tournament is stay-to-play, its block will have a cutoff in early November; if it is not, book early anyway, because every other family in the bracket is doing the same thing.
The Christmas break: the long-haul weekend
The week between Christmas and New Year is when teams fly. Florida, Arizona, Las Vegas and the big Canadian cities run multi-day showcases with four or five games, and the age groups skew older, 14U and up, because those are the teams for whom a December tournament is also a recruiting event. If you have a younger team, the local invitationals the same week are usually cheaper and closer, and the ice is better rested.
MLK and Presidents' Day: the volume weekends
These are the bread and butter of the travel season. Nearly every association runs something, which means two things: there is always a tournament within two hours, and the good ones fill by early December. If your team wants a specific destination, register in the fall. If it wants a good tournament, there will be one left in January, but the choice of hotel will not be yours by then.
Reading the listing
Three fields on every Tourney Hunter listing do most of the work for a holiday weekend. The dates, checked each night against the organizer's own page. The hotel policy, with the organizer's exact sentence and the date we read it, so you know before you book whether rooms have to go through a block. And the "updated" date, so you can tell a listing that was confirmed yesterday from one that has been sitting since September.
Then confirm with the organizer. We check every page nightly, and organizers still change dates in the week before a holiday more than at any other time of year.