THANKSGIVING AND CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEARS, OH MY

Living in a town with three major theme park companies, you start to see where each develop their special niche. Universal Studios it's Halloween. With all of the classic monster movies to pull from, they have became the masters of the things that go bump in the night. During Holloween Horror Nights they scare the snot out of normaly sane individuals with deranged clowns, Bloody Mary, demented nursery ryhme characters and thier own creation: The Chain Saw Drill Team.(zombies chasing people around the park with real chain saws. . .with the blades removed of course.) I have heard of many occasions where half drunk guests try to challenge the cast for thier chain saws. Word to the wise, unlike at Disney and SeaWorld, scare characters at Universal can and do fight back.

Sea World always seems to have a 'We are the World' feel. For a while anyway, Fourth of July was thier niche. They had special patriotic Shamu shows and firworks. At the time I'm writing this, they had just been bought out by a foreign company, so time will tell if that will still be thier niche. A side note, they have a Shamu show called 'Believe'. My friend saw it the other day and said it was really cool. . . until the whales stopped believing. Apparently something happened and they started aggressively circling the tank. Needless to say, the trainers bailed out of the water until they get them calmed down.

Disney's niche in the holidays is Christmas. Nobody can even come close to all of the details that Disney puts in thier displays. There's a Forty Five foot Christmas Tree in the lobby of Wilderness Lodge. Although the uneven placement of the Teepee ornaments has bugged me all Season. Yacht and Beach club had a chocolate carousel. Boardwalk had a gingerbread gazebo with a moving train set running around it. Why a Gazebo? I'd like to know. If anyone has an answer, emial me. THe Grand Florida has a huge ginger bread house in their lobby. Our guests in the campgrounds who set up for the whole season have taken it upon thier self to decorate thier motor homes with lights and christmas displays to such a degree that is has drawn the attention of a travel channel television show.

The Millions of lights in the Osbourne Family lights display at the Studios lost alot of it's charm once residential street was plowed over for the new stunt show. The Spectical of Lights, or as we call it, S O L . . .(Yeah we have a few other choice discriptions as well), anyway, it all started in Little Rock Arkansaw. Mr Osbourne managed to tick off some neighbors with his massive Christmas light display every year. Law enforcement was called in to manage the crowds and government officals fined him for disrupting the peace and creating traffic jams. Story has it that a particular neighbor got mad, so he bought their house and threw lights on it as well. As this battle was spinning out of control, in steps Disney. They offered to pay off his fines and in return Disney would have the rights to the displays. And thus a Disney legend is born. A little side note, I was told that in 2008, as the metal globe that sits above the display was being installed, it was accidently dropped from the crane and it rolled several hundred yards into the park before stopping. It survived. Dented, but survived. One of my favorite memories of SOL, was back when they used to hand out 3D glasses. With them on, you'd see angels every where. One day, I came across a five or six years old child, standing inches away from a tall lit up candy cane. She'd put the glasses look at the lights. She'd take them off and look at the lights. Put them on, take them off. She must have done this five or six timed in a row. It was like she was trying to figure out where the angels came from.

Epcot always has the warm fuzzy 'all is well with the world' shows. Besides Illuminations, during chriatmas, they have a retelling of the Christmas story by guest celebrity narrators. It's always standing room only, which is why i haven't seen it yet. When you work for the mouse, you tend to not wait around when the lines are long.

Magic Kingdom, being the grand daddy of them all has a Christmas parade, an electric light parade, fireworks and characters out the ying yang. One year back in the nineties, it was a rainy, nasty mess here in Orlando on Christmas day. But the Disney Christmas parade that was televised showed bright sunny skys. So we had guests from Tampa decide to take a drive over to Orlando and get into the sunny side of the state. . . I mean after all, it was sunny on TV. Ooops, Faux Pas. Most, if not all of the Parade is filled in advance. This year Millie Cyrus was supposed to host it. I didn't have the heart to tell Millie's fans that her parts were aleady taped.

New Years has it's usual fireworks and confetti. On the eve of the new millenium, however, Disney had planned for everything from a mild hiccup in the computer systems to an all out Armaggeddon. They had high powered construction lights at every intersection in case the Y2K struck down our power grid. THey had lengthy plans in case of senario A, B and X. THEN. . .nothing happened. Universal Studios, in contrast, gave us one sheet of paper with some meager instructions in case of power outages and/ or Y2K mayhem. Again, nothing happened.

Poor Thanksgiving tends to get over looked alot. Management always gets a turkey and/ or ham for us and we potluck the rest. One year, Epic had several turkeys delievered to the stage on a tall, metal catering cart. The cart was pushed outside to give us room in the trailer. And there it sat . . . and sat . . . and sat. It had to have been nearly a month that it was forgotten outside of the Epic trailer. When one day, some one decided to send it back to catering. It was then that we realized we still had aleast two roast turkey's in there. Needless to say they were a bit fuzzy.
Martin Luther King day, I never really thought much about him, UNTIL his day turned into a paid holiday.

November is Native American Month and at the Wilderness Lodge, we have a tribal leader bless the lodge. Maybe that's why we're staying busy in the slow periods. In our lobby we have two totem poles. Since it is considered to be bad luck to have them face each other, ours are off set just a bit, but I was told that the totems almost facing each other is another reason we get it blessed every year, in order to keep all of the bad spirits, karma, ect away.

Another November memory was the year Disney decided to float the Macy's Thanksgiving day ballons over New York street. I was told that there had to technicians on the building roofs 24/7 to keep the helium ballond from tearing up or getting tangled up since they would sink in the cool night air and could possibly over inflate in the heated up day time air. We still managed to kill the a few ballons. I can'r remember if we did that one or two years, but when the Osbourne lights moved in the Macy's ballons moved up the road to Universal.

THanks for readiing. Keep coming back each month for more inside the insider's view of Disney

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.