HOLIDAYS AT THE MOUSE HOUSE

I often said, "I now know what kind of job the Grinch had that made him hate Christmas." Don't get me wrong. I love Christmas, but holidays in costuming was like a chaotic fire drill. We had row after row of toy soldier costumes (most of which had to be repainted every year), a thousand and one santa-ish costumes(all of which had to be dry cleaned and altered before, during and after the holidays), several inflatable snowmen and women(who always seemed to be missing parts from one year to the next) and a plethera of scarves, hats, mittens (a large chunk of which never found their way back into storage come January.)

For a while we had a Christmas Beauty and the Beast "Holiday Enhancement" show. Belle's dress was a beautifull bugundy and gold ball gown. Heavy as a ten ton truck, but beautiful. Along with Belle and Beast, the holiday show also had several kids from the park dressed as big round Christmas ornaments. Cute idea. Cute kids. A royal pain to deal with. We'd put the large balls of foam on the pargo at night to take them back to the building and one bump in the road, they'd all tumble out like dominoes. On a few times a custodial person would find a wayward ornament and bring it back for us.

You can always tell the state of mind of an area by how they treat the holidays. Fansatmic! was not having a good year back in the early 2000's and it showed. For our Halloween pumpkin carving contest, thier's was uncarved with a cut out of Mickey's ears, hands and feet sticking out from underneath it, as if he had been squashed. On the side of the pumpkin was the words, "Some imagination, Huh?" (those familiar with the show will understand where that came from). It's pretty safe to say that when your cast symbolicly squishes the corporate icon. . . They Are Not Happy.

We used to have Christmas Pargo Parades. A cast only thing, each department dressed up thier pargo in holiday themed decorations and they would be judged by the Studio's Executives. First year was a year for venting. Coordinators had lost thier status(demoted)a few months earlier. There were cut backs, shortened work weeks to save money and we saw a ton of money being spent on a new ride (Tower of Terror) that was having a lot of problems. Since all's fair in Love and Pargo Parades, the cast let management know just how unhappy they were when the evening's entertainment included thier version of the Seven Days of Christmas.
"On the second day of Christmas our managerment gave to us. . . a new exciting thrill ride." A chunk of dry wall was dropped from the catwalks of the stage signifing one of the many problems Tower had in the testing stages. (all was fixed and it's been running flawlessly ever since.) "On the fifth day of Christmas our management gave to us. . . Five disgruntal leads." -Insert explative of choice here-. . . you get the idea.

It wasn't all bad though. One of my all time favorite pargo's was the year a department got permission to use one of the Fort's draft horses and hitched it up to the pargo. On top was a crate of chickens and other hillbilly stuff. It was titled "A Country Christmas". Costuming's pargos were . . . let's just say, we never won. After a few years, the parade turned less Christmassy and more odd. THe year the character department provided the "floor show" entertainment that looked like it was straight out of a sleazy bar was the last year we had the pargo parade.

Another holiday tradtion that's still going strong is the 70% of cast sales, or as I call them Grab and Growl Sales. They open the doors and it's like a stampede. People drag around boxes overflowing with mickey shirts and Nemos dolls for pennies on the dollar. I saw one lady almost get jumped by another when the first lady mistakenly started looking through the other's box of stuff. "THAT"S MINE!" she said. A bunch of us slowly backed away, but an eye on the rabid shopper. Most of it is surplus from the merchdise shops although one year i managed to ge a nice four piece luggage set for $100 bucks.

On the upside, Disney at Christmas is awesome. When I worked at the Boardwalk the lobby smelled like gingerbread for days after they built the train gazebo. I've heard there is a chocolate carousel at one of the resorts. I think I'll have to find it this year.