After-Action Report: New Christmas Decs!

Short post this time—I've been a bit sick and the holiday tasks are piling up as it is! But I did manage to fit in a visit to the main park recently, and I took a few pictures of some lovely decorations that have been added this year.

I'll begin in Frontierland, which has been putting up Christmas decorations for quite some time (as described in this post). But these ones are new, and have a lot of character. It's not just the ornaments that are unique to each—the evergreen bases to which they are attached vary from post to post, as if each was assembled from scratch by a different person who used whatever they had on hand or could easily find. The highlight has to be the single boot, which is a perfect Old West stand-in for a Christmas stocking:

From there, we move to Fantasyland, where...I don't want to alarm anyone, but they have finally started putting up decorations in the Fantasyland Courtyard. I speculated in the post linked above about what that might hypothetically look like, but the reality turned out to be far more restrained than what I was imagining. You could put these up in your house without anyone batting an eye:

Yes, those are apples on the decoration for Snow White.

It almost feels like a beta test, like maybe they plan on expanding these in years to come. They are a little sparse for the medieval castle environment, I think.

Around this time most years, I put the blog on a little year-end hiatus so I can focus on my holiday obligations and brainstorm ideas for the new year. But I'm finding myself in a bit of a quandary this time around...I think I'm running out of topics to write about! I am coming to the end of my fourth straight year of Disneyland blogging, having maintained a pretty faithful weekly schedule for most of that time. Even a lifelong just-short-of-obsessed fan like me has to run dry eventually, right?

There are a few things I don't want to do. I don't want to start spacing the posts out more, for fear my eternally busy schedule squeezes out my motivation to maintain the blog altogether. And I don't want to let it devolve into more of this—just collections of recent photos detailing minutiae like crowd levels, construction progress, and maintenance hiccups. I want to keep this a thoughtful blog.

I might not be averse to expanding my subject matter. Reviewing other theme parks is probably off the table for now for financial reasons, but I occasionally touch on the subject of Disney movies, and perhaps I could go into more detail on my thoughts in that area.

Ideally, though, I would keep my focus on the Disneyland Resort. So I put it to you...what would you like to see me write about that I haven't yet? Any attractions, past or present, you'd like to see my take on? Principles of theme park design I should address? General questions I should answer?

I'll give you the next...oh, three weeks or so, to think about it. Until then, Happy Holidays to my few but loyal readers, and keep dreaming!

The Second Sense: Top 5 Holiday Music Loops

As long as we're thinking about Christmas music...

This isn't the first time I've gone off about the area music loops in the Disneyland Resort and it probably won't be the last. But we're solidly into the Christmas season now, with all its attendant responsibilities, and I need to write and post something simple. Simple...like one of the most basic delights of the holiday season at Disneyland: the temporary replacement of many area music loops with holiday versions.

Background music is a key element in creating themed atmosphere (or atmosphere at all, really), and this is especially true when the theme involves Christmas, because the intergenerationally familiar music is such a big part of the holiday. Disneyland's holiday loops are generally excellent for their purpose, but only about half of them are much good for any other purpose—i.e. general seasonal listening. I'll pull up the New Orleans Square waterfront loop as part of my Disneyland Christmas lineup, but not when I just feel like getting my holiday spirit on. Dixieland jazz isn't a normal part of my music listening habits.

But there are a handful of these loops from both parks, past and present, that I absolutely adore on their own merits, not just because they remind me of Disneyland. Here they are, in reverse order of my preference, so that the best is saved for last!