Disneyland - Christmas in California Adventure

Over and over, the thing that is amazing is how good Disney is at making things feel right.

When you enter California Adventure, Buena Vista Street fills a similar role as Main Street, but evoking 1920s Los Angeles instead of 1910 Marceline, Missouri or Fort Collins Colorado.

One of the first things that caught my eye were the large bells hanging from garlands. They reminded me of Bakelite. I don't think they really were, or even know that you would find decorations like that in 1920s Los Angeles, but it felt right.

Moving left into Hollywood Land, it is still Los Angeles, but more modern, and it reminded me of the decorations we had just seen at The Grove. That felt right.

If we had gone right instead, it would have taken us to Paradise Pier, starting with Ariel's Undersea Adventure. 

That building is one of the most impressive in the park. Realizing that it was started as something completely different (a replica of the Palace of Fine Arts Rotunda in San Francisco that housed the Golden Dreams film) makes the transformation that much more amazing as finials, relief sculpture, and even crushed up shells in the floor make it perfect for the ride. Garlands were added that fit into the architecture of the building and the color scheme of the ride.

The rest of Paradise Pier is flashier, like a coastal boardwalk, so decorations were added that were bright and colorful, with bold gift packages and peppermint sticks.

Moving into the Pacific Wharf, which is modeled on San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf and Monterey's Cannery Row, things are not quite as bright and colorful. Here the primary decorations were simple lines of Christmas lights hung across the spaces between buildings. They were spaced apart in a way that felt somewhat sparse, but it fit in.

 

There are two California Adventure lands based on Pixar movies, and so those were chances to get a little more fanciful. Both did so in ways that felt right without being over the top.

For A Bug's Land, where attractions are built by the bugs out of cast-off human items, it was a simple thing to add a few Christmas ornaments and lights. Where you would normally have straws and pencils, suddenly there is a candy cane, and the pencil has a Santa head, which is cute and brings up some nostalgia for anyone who has ever had one of those pencils.

The most amazing variety was in Cars Land. The replication of details in the movie was already impressive, but they just let their imaginations run wild for the Christmas decorations. There were "trees" made of tires, traffic cones, and license plates, and garlands made of mufflers.

Any one land is impressive, but taken together it is amazing how well they do, and it makes the park a fun place to be.