DISNEYLAND AT CHRISTMAS
You read that right, and to some it may suggest unnerving horror and to others the exact means of perfection, and so forth. To talk about it in huge detail would be worthy and maybe I’ll yet do that in the essay section, so Andrew Farrell won’t cast an askance eye at me. ;-)
But more seriously — friend Thea had suggested it to me because she’s going to be moving with her husband to London next month, and wanted to do one of a series of going-away adventures and the like. So she and her two friends Amy and Julie and I decamped over there yesterday. I had been there in October for the first time in 13 years so I knew what to generally expect, but I hadn’t even been there during December, and it was…well, very well lit.
Perhaps the most specific thing to talk about for now would be the fireworks display, which Disneyland has every night as a matter of course. So for the holiday they transmogrify it, much like much else in the park, into something called “Believe in the Spirit of Christmas” or the like, I forget the details, and Disneyland being what it is, there were announcements from mysterious speakers and towers as the time drew near. Julie, a Disneyland addict, suggested watching from near Tom Sawyer’s Island and the Haunted Mansion, which we did.
The display was good enough, I’ve seen better and worse but it was a masterpiece of synchronization to the music (which amusingly included a brief Hanukkah section with white and blue fireworks — something about the marginalization of that just seemed, you know, so American), but the creepy parts came at the beginning and end, reminding me of the bizarre Big Brotherish bits of the NYC July 4 firework experience I caught last year. A generic old woman voice delivered all sorts of trembly voiced reflections on ‘do you remember the spirit of the season?’ and urged us to ‘believe,’ while there was an opening and closing metapopDisneyballad that was effective in a state of the art way but still bizarro on the other as whoever it was (Lohan? Duff? Vanessa Williams?) sang about all the nostalgia hot buttons, hot chocolate and snow and ginger bread and OH GOD MAKE IT STOP. Some things aren’t camp, they’re just unsettling.
Mind you, I was amused by the snowfall at the end of the display. Sure it was a bunch of clumps of tiny bubbles and all but they drifted down out of the sky from those towers so it had to be Disneyland magic! Eep.