Kidnap the Magic: Decorating for Christmas...Disneyland Style!

Thanksgiving* is only a few days away, if you can believe that. Once the dishes are cleared away, the Christmas season Officially Begins on a nationwide scale. Due to the increased prominence of online shopping (and a few high-profile tragedies engendered by the pressure-cooker atmosphere of certain “mega-sales”), Black Friday is starting to slide off its throne as the shopping day of the season...but a lot of people still like to take advantage of the day off to do their decorating.

And perhaps some of those people would like to decorate in the style of the Happiest Merriest Place on Earth. They could just drop a wad of dough on ornaments sold at the parks, but that wouldn't actually do the trick. Odd as it may seem, the fictional denizens of Disneyland do not decorate using real Disneyland merchandise. Our hypothetical people will need some pointers. Fortunately for those people, they live in a world that includes this blog.

This post is going to include general guidelines rather than step-by-step instructions. Disneyland's Christmas decorations are, as a rule, magnificent, and it's really inspiring to us crafty types to see how the various area themes intersect with holiday imagery and traditions. It would almost be missing the point to try recreating most of these uniquely designed items exactly, especially since they evolve over the years. So peruse, enjoy the photos, and get some awesome ideas for a Disneyland-flavored Christmas of your own!

Main Street, USA

The decorations on Main Street epitomize what I think most people consider “classic” Christmas theming. The park's big tree is there, of course, along with plenty of wreaths and garlands, and the dominant colors for ornaments are red, green, gold, and silver. Other components of Main Street's Christmas look include gingerbread cookies, nutcrackers, red flocked ribbon with a gold filigree pattern, and those spiraled bugles that only seem to exist in Christmas displays and on European mailboxes. It all creates an impression of tasteful, traditional opulence, perhaps more in line with the Victorian era than the Edwardian period style that dominates Main Street during the rest of the year. I don't consider this breaking theme, however—the Victorian era is when Christmas as we know it really took off, and if people were a little more restrained after the turn of the 20^th Century, then surely they, in a spirit of thrift, would re-use the previous generation's ornaments.

The real stars of this show, though, are the famed Mickey Mouse wreaths, strung between Main Street's upper stories right over the street itself:

These haven't been put up this year due to a conflict with the tall floats in the Paint the Night parade, but they're iconic enough that most people who hit upon a Disneyland decorating theme for Christmas will attempt to make one at some point. The simplest way is to wire together three wreaths to get the Mickey-head shape; everything after that is down to personal taste.

Adventureland

Christmas spirit in Adventureland is restricted to the Jungle Cruise—sorry, “Jingle Cruise”—which avoids the thematic dissonance inherent in slapping winter holiday imagery on top of tropical theming by hanging a big old lampshade on the absurdity of it all. The Jingle Cruise is framed as the skippers' sad attempt to bring Christmas to the jungle—the delivery plane carrying their decorations and gifts having come to a sticky end, they've had to kitbash some Christmas cheer for the boathouse out of things they have close to hand:

You could certainly do the same if the fancy took you that way. Alternately, you could take your cues from the ride itself and slop more conventional Christmas decorations randomly over your houseplants and furniture:

New Orleans Square

If the Main Street Christmas tradition is, well, traditional, and the Adventureland tradition is “scrape together what you can out of what you have in the vicinity,” then the New Orleans Square tradition is...

...combining Christmas with other holidays, apparently.

If you want to go the Nightmare Before Christmas/Haunted Mansion Holiday route, there is no shortage of enterprising Tim Burton fans sharing their ideas online. Look around on Pinterest if that's your thing.

Me, I prefer the Christmas-by-way-of-Mardi-Gras style in the rest of New Orleans Square. I might even have some direct experience decorating in that motif.

I'll post detailed instructions for making one of these things later in the season, so stay tuned! In the meantime, the best way to get the right look is to go gaudy—lots of bright colors (any bright colors—in New Orleans Square, every lamppost and balcony has its own color scheme for the holidays), glitter, and big ornaments. Use masks, musical instruments, and strings of metallic beads to evoke the Crescent City. Try assembling displays like this one:

Crescent-shaped Santa heads are another prominent and unusual sight:

New Orleans Square is always one of the most atmospheric parts of Disneyland, and it's no less true at Christmas than during the rest of the year, thanks to these distinctive decorations. Give it a try!

Critter Country and Frontierland

I'm lumping these two lands together because for the most part, they share a Christmas style. The wreaths and garlands are built on a base of naturalistic evergreen of several different types, as if the inhabitants went for a walk in the woods, brought back some of everything, including the pine cones, and tied it all together:

The ball ornaments, you'll notice, are sparser than on Main Street and come in warmer, richer variations of the baseline standard hues of red, gold, and green. Bows tend to be made of gingham and burlap, and in Frontierland especially there is a large variation in the ribbons used from one part of the land to the next. In fact, each sub-area of Frontierland has its own spin on the overall aesthetic—this isn't just one place, but a whole range of places, with access to different resources when it comes to decorating. One thing you'll see a lot of is jingle bells—either lacquered bright red like berries or as rusty as if they went straight from a worn-out harness to the wreath.

In Critter Country, the secondary ornaments include things like apples and straw beehives, and many of the ball ornaments have fake “honey” dripped over the tops. It's a bit more homey and less rugged than Frontierland, which is an amusingly ironic situation—the critters are just a tad more civilized than the humans!

And for the record, this is what I wound up with when I assembled a Frontierland-style wreath:

(I'm pretty proud of my idea to use the antler ornament, even if no direct equivalent exists in Frontierland itself.)

Fantasyland

Fantasyland, curiously enough, isn't much decorated for Christmas. The decorations on the Castle are more for the front side, facing onto the Plaza Hub. Yes, “it's a small world” gets its massive holiday makeover—more on that next week!—but that's just one ride, and the decorations in question are too tied into its eccentric style to properly represent Fantasyland as a whole. The only other thing in the area to get any Christmas decorations is...Storybook Land, with teeny tiny trees, wreaths, and garlands added to some of the models. At such a scale, there isn't room for much distinctive detail—no reason to peg these as the decorations in Pinocchio's village or Cinderella's town as opposed to any other model town.

So if you want to decorate à la Fantasyland, you'll need to map the territory for yourself. Fortunately, many items associated with the iconography of the Fantasyland attractions are commonly made into Christmas ornaments as it is. Visit any decently sized Christmas store or website, and you should be able to find apples, jewels, castles, fairies, carousel horses, sailing ships, roses, wooden toys, donkeys, circus animals...even frogs and antique cars for Mr. Toad! And of course, Disney produces hundreds of ornaments featuring their animated characters, if you really need to hammer home your intentions.

And then there's the Matterhorn, which has its own winter imagery. Rankin-Bass has pretty well cemented the connection between Abominable Snowmen and Christmas, but I couldn't say where you might go from there. You can't expect me to do all the creative work here.

Mickey's Toontown

If I had to choose one word to define the Toontown holiday theme, it would be “excess.” The Toons do not know when to stop decorating. Here are two incarnations of the big tree in front of Toontown City Hall over the years:

The first one, bowing over under the weight of so many outsized, mismatched ornaments, has always cracked me up. But the second one is technically a superior sculpture, with its absolute uniformity of flat colors, like so much celluloid paint. (The string of lights wound around the star is a winning touch.) Most of the decorations in Toontown have that flat plastic look. You might have your work cut out for you finding similar items—those look more like balls from a McDonald's Playplace than any Christmas ornaments I have ever seen for sale.

Beyond that, each character in the Neighborhood area decorates according to their own tastes. Mickey's House has the most classic look, of course, with big outdoor bulbs like everyone used to use before the smaller ones got cheaper. Minnie's front yard sports trees made of lavender tinsel, hung with pink ornaments and pearly beads. Goofy's idea of decorating for Christmas really has to be seen to be believed:

And so on. If you love these characters enough to be taking decorating tips from them, you probably have ideas of your own. Just be silly and don't skimp on anything. More is more, with Toontown, and the faker it looks, the better.

Tomorrowland

And at last we come to Tomorrowland, which has not traditionally been decorated for the holidays at all...well, not much, anyway. The fourth act of the Carousel of Progress took place during the Christmas season, but I'm not sure that counts. Decades later—in the same building, no less—the “Treehouse of Technology” in Innoventions had a Christmas setting during the right time of the year, but it was never very obvious, and anyway that's closed now too. Neither one, from what I've been able to recall and/or gather, was particularly...Tomorrowlandish. They were just normal Christmas decorations and images that happened to be located in Tomorrowland, not anything comprising a unique holiday aesthetic for the land.

We can do better.

It's not as if futuristic Christmas decorations don't exist as a concept. Do a Google Image search on the phrase to see loads of examples. Here's one of my favorites:

This is sooooo “classic Tomorrowland,” with those brightly colored spheres suspended on wires.** And that sort of thing is just one example. Here are some other motifs and ideas to consider for decorating in a Tomorrowland vein:

• Stars
• Circuit-board sculpture
• Chrome finishes
• Neon and LED lights
• Snowflakes
• Art Deco-inspired crystal shapes
• Planets and/or subatomic particles as ball ornaments (think of those Styrofoam science-fair kits)
• Fractal patterns

Without an existing model to work from, this one's entirely up to you—what does Tomorrowland mean to you, and how does that intersect with typical Christmas imagery? As with Fantasyland, if you really need to make your intentions clear you can always add some IP-based ornaments...and if your presentation ends up a bit jumbled as a result, it will definitely evoke Tomorrowland as we know it.

The holiday season is just getting underway. Keep your eyes open for more Kidnap the Magic and hopefully at least one After-Action Report in the weeks to come!

* American Thanksgiving, that is. I realize that a sizable percentage of my regular readers are in fact Canadian and are so far past Thanksgiving that they can't even see it in the rear-view mirror.

** Come to think of it, those look a lot like the Toontown ornaments.