Is Santa still accepting Christmas wishes? Because I have a few.
More than anything, I would love to see California’s theme parks get back to plussing their holiday celebrations, rather than downsizing them. Fans fill the parks during Christmas season, spending on holiday food and merchandise in addition to tickets and parking. Those fans deserve to see parks reinvesting that money into the season, rather than simply banking extra profit at the end of the year.
So what should parks improve? Let’s work backward and start with what makes this season special: people and light, for the darkest time of year.
Theme parks bring tens of thousands of people together each day, but for some the camaraderie of the season gets lost when they spend most their time there looking at animatronics or screens. So I wish for more investment in live entertainment. Give us more experiences such as the mariachi show at Disney California Adventure and the Christmas plays in Knott’s Bird Cage Theatre.
The best holiday entertainment invites the audience to become part of the show. I would love to see Disneyland brings a version of Disneyland Paris’ “Let’s Sing Christmas” show to the Fantasyland Theatre next year. Better yet, stage this singalong with a live chamber orchestra instead of taped accompaniment. Let Disneyland’s regular guests get a small taste of the spectacle that the park delivers for invited guests at its Candlelight Processional each year.
Universal puts on a great Grinchmas show in Orlando. So I will spend a Christmas wish on Universal using one of its soundstage spaces to give California fans a similar production, filled with live music, for our Grinchmas season. Or, at least, craft a “Grinch’s house” set-up in Universal Plaza that allows multiple Grinches to meet guests at once, to shorten that often long wait for the best character meet of the season.
Over at Knott’s, how about a Christmas version of the park’s popular, award-winning Ghost Town Alive! summer interactive theater? Knott’s already does Christmas better than any other local park, so this is gliding the lily, but what better time of year is there to celebrate with such excess?
Speaking of excess, the proper number of lights in a theme park at Christmas time always is “more.” It’s long past time for a refresh of Disneyland’s Christmas parade. The park does not lend itself to the type of massive light display that Disney’s Hollywood Studios once staged with its Osborne Family Spectacle of Dancing Lights in Florida. But Disneyland could stage that type of display as a parade.
Think the Main Street Electrical Parade, but Christmas. Give us a Toontown Christmas light display, with a parade through the park of each Disney Animation family’s “home” light display.
As for holiday food, local parks already tend to do this well, though — again — the wish is always for more. But let me close my wish list with this. Most theme parks offer holiday cookie decorating as an upsell treat. I want … holiday churro decorating.
Please, Santa, we’ve been good theme park fans this year.