By Bruce C. Steele
In the wee hours of each November 1, before guests arrive, Main Street, U.S.A., is a very busy place indeed. Within Magic Kingdom park at Walt Disney World Resort, cast members are busy transforming the street from autumn-inspired and Halloween décor into a Christmas wonderland. By the time guests arrive later that morning, the fall holiday has been replaced with winter, as if by magic.
It’s overnight magic that’s a full year in the making. “We may take a day off here and there,” says Lisa Borotkanics, Manager, Holiday Services at Walt Disney World Resort, “but not anything substantial until next February.”
After that February breather each year, the Holiday Services and Resort Enhancement teams get back to work. There’s spring décor to install, then a new look for the summer and Independence Day—all while work continues at each resort’s holiday warehouse to refurbish and prepare the thousands of decorations for the autumn and winter holidays. The busiest time on both coasts begins in August, since autumn décor needs to be installed in time for the Halloween celebrations that begin around Labor Day and continue through October. (In Florida, decorations for the autumn and winter holidays for the parks, resorts, and cruise ships together fill more than 100 trailers.) But everything leads up to that spectacular changeover on Halloween night.
It can’t begin until all the guests are gone, which can be 1 a.m. or later, and it has to be completed before guests return, as early at 7 or 8 a.m. At the Magic Kingdom, that means getting all of Halloween out and much of Christmas installed in just a few hours. Naturally, it’s all hands on duty. That includes the full-time staff from Holiday Services and Resort Enhancement, as well as dozens of other cast members from many other departments.
At Disneyland park, “install looks a bit different,” says Dawn Pipal-Keehne, Resort Enhancement Area Manager for Disneyland Resort. “We remove all Halloween [in the early morning of] November 1 and then move into Main Street holiday install for three nights, typically starting [in the early morning] on November 2.”
“I would describe it as a very beautiful, chaotic dance,” says Pipal-Keehne, Resort Enhancement Area Manager for Disneyland Resort, “because you’ve got to realize it’s not just us prepping for a holiday season, but all of the other crafts in the resort as well. [It involves] all the maintenance teams and custodial and the delivery and project teams—and entertainment, who are doing full dress rehearsals of the [holiday] parade on Main Street, U.S.A. It is a very fine, calculated, organized dance. And even at its best, there’s always sometimes when we have to pivot, because we didn’t know that was going to happen.”
The leaders of the installation, who have been doing this for years, know when it’s right, Borotkanics says. With long experience, they can stand along Main Street, U.S.A., and just look around to see what’s right and what needs adjusting. “You just need to make sure that our optics are correct when the park opens,” she says. “So, throughout that night you’re constantly looking at timing and optics.”
A Holiday in Florida
For the Magic Kingdom, it takes two consecutive nights to get everything in place. After that, the Walt Disney World Resort Holiday Services team and its decorating allies move on to the other parks, then the hotel resorts—a task that takes the Disney elves until almost Thanksgiving. Each resort has an impressive tree as its focal point: 45-foot-tall interior trees at the Grand Floridian Resort & Spa, Wilderness Lodge Resort, and Animal Kingdom Lodge, for example, and a 70-foot outdoor tree at the Contemporary Resort.
As if four parks and more than two dozen resort hotels weren’t enough, the Walt Disney World Holiday Services team also decorates four of the ships of the Disney Cruise Line. (The Anaheim team transforms the Disney Wonder.) For Halloween and then for Christmas on each ship, “we decorate in one morning,” Borotkanics says. “We work very closely with the ship’s crew. We board the ship by 8 o’clock in the morning and typically are gone by 2 o’clock [in the afternoon]. We decorate the entire lobby, and then we decorate the clubs, the kids’ clubs, the restaurants, some of the merchandise [locations], and some of the lounges, too.” For Halloween, each ship has a unique “pumpkin tree” with a face and a name: Reap on the Disney Magic, Bog on the Disney Wonder, Grim on the Disney Dream, Mucklebones on the Disney Fantasy, and Boo on the Disney Wish.
There’s really no break during the holiday season, Borotkanics says, since by the time Christmas décor is installed across the full resort, ongoing quality control has already begun, ensuring everything remains in a fully festive mode throughout the season. Eventually, January rolls around, and it’s time to put everything away until next year—another middle-of-the-night task, this time taking just two weeks to clear the entire Walt Disney World Resort. “It does come down much quicker than it goes up,” Borotkanics says. The task in early 2023 will be a little different than in most years, though, since January also marks the end of the Walt Disney World Resort’s 50th Anniversary celebration. All that EARidescent 50th birthday décor, which has coexisted with the holiday overlay for the 2021 and 2022 seasons, will be leaving along with Christmas.
Meanwhile, in Anaheim…
A tour of the Resort Enhancement warehouse in Anaheim just days before Halloween finds a surprising calm. Everything has been meticulously planned, based on decades of experience, and most of the decorations awaiting their turn for transport to the resort have long since been renovated, refreshed, or replaced and marked with large gift-like tags reading simply, “READY FOR INSTALL 2022.” Some décor, including the 60-foot tree for Main Street, U.S.A., is already backstage at Disneyland park, in a staging area hidden behind Splash Mountain. The tree, which is stored from year to year in several sections, is constructed and largely decorated backstage. The day of its debut—November 7, this year—it will be carefully separated into two parts and transported by cranes to its showcase position in Town Square. Once in place, its 200 custom-made electric candles and other lights and its 1,800-plus ornaments will be checked by the Resort Enhancement team to make sure everything is perfect for its first encounter with park guests mere hours later. The park’s Entertainment team members are crucial partners for rigging, building, and lighting the tree, Pipal-Keehne notes.
She adds, “It takes us approximately 3 weeks to install all décor around the resort, including Downtown Disney, the hotels, the Disney Wonder cruise ship and Aulani,” the Disney resort and spa on the Hawaiian island of Oahu.
Just before Halloween, however, many other trees are still back at the warehouse, including the Buena Vista Street tree for Disney California Adventure park. Stored in five sections, the tree is already decorated with its custom-made Art Deco-style ornaments, supersized re-creations of vintage examples from the 1920s and early 1930s. Grand ornaments also had to be custom-created for the 40-foot tree at Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel & Spa, matching the resort’s Mission theme with full-size Arts & Crafts lanterns and geometric stars and the like. Nearby in the warehouse, also awaiting its turn, stands the Cars Land tree, in three sections, ready for installation, with its hubcap ornaments and star topper fashioned from tailpipes.
Not all the trees are so massive. “Our largest tree is 60 feet tall, and our smallest tree is six inches,” Pipal-Keehne says. The tiny trees and similarly scaled garlands go into the Lilliputian scenes at the Storybook Land Canal Boats in Fantasyland, “our smallest and most intimate installation.” (The holiday overlays of the Jungle Cruise, “it’s a small world,” and Haunted Mansion in Disneyland park and of the Jungle Cruise in the Magic Kingdom are supervised by the parks’ Entertainment departments, rather than by the holiday decoration teams.)
Despite the rapid approach of installation time, many cast members are still calmly constructing and decorating. Carrie Henry stands at a worktable piled high with red-and-green bows, on her way to making about 612 of them—just in case her quota of 600 bows isn’t quite enough to get the job done. She estimates it takes her about three minutes per bow, depending on how cooperative the ribbon is that she’s working with.
Behind her, Brandon Griewank has recently finished a floral centerpiece for upstairs at the Carthay Circle Restaurant in Disney California Adventure park, combining white poinsettias and roses with amaryllis and snowberries around a central core of birch branches, some of which are draped with hanging dried Amaranthus. Most of these elements, Griewank notes, were sourced by “shopping” the aisles and aisles of artificial florals available within the warehouse.
Not far away from Griewank is Lorie Rossi, decorating six-foot trees on a “French opulence” theme for Disneyland park’s Club 33. The work has involved “a lot of embellishment,” she notes, including repainting existing ornaments to match the club’s color scheme and adding touches of glitter, some of which is now delicately embellishing her blond hair.
Everything Old Is New Again
A lot of décor is new each season, of course, but many elements endure from year to year. Mylar ornaments, especially the darker colors, tend to fade in the California sun, so they may only last a year or two. (Before Disney puts in an order for hundreds of ornaments with a vendor, samples are acquired and left outside for about three months, to make sure they’ll tolerate the intense sunshine.) The custom-made ornaments can last for years and years, with yearly refurbishment as needed. Also refurbished annually is the artificial greenery that makes up the bulk of the resort’s garlands and can often return for three to five years. Longest lasting are the carefully maintained giant trees, each of them subject to weeks of maintenance at the end of every season. “Those big trees, we get a very long life out of those,” Pipal-Keehne says. “The last Main Street, U.S.A., tree was at least 12 years old when we just replaced it about two years ago.”
The Disneyland park holiday location about which Pipal-Keehne may be most excited is available to guests in every season. It’s just a year old, but its history has its roots in Pipal-Keehne’s own childhood. “Plaza Point is a year-round holiday location for the Disneyland park at the end of Main Street, U.S.A.,” she explains. The project was initiated by Walt Disney Imagineering, but the Resort Enhancement team was asked to handle much of the décor. Thus was born the legend of shop founder Miss Evelyn Toro, a world traveler who loved all the holidays from every culture and brought that obsession to her Main Street, U.S.A., shop.
“The character is based on my mother, Evelyn, whose maiden name is Toro,” Pipal-Keehne reveals. A native of Puerto Rico, “she decorates her house every single year; it takes her two weeks. There’s a tree in every room. There are five or six Christmas villages. When I think about the holidays and growing up, I have my passion for what I do in the world of art and design and holidays because of my mom.”
The shop is a celebration of diversity—which was something of a challenge in sourcing authentic Victorian-style décor to match the era of Main Street, U.S.A. But as they do with anything else they can imagine but not find ready-made, the Resort Enhancement team simply created the elements they needed from scratch. “We were doing research for paper cutouts and ornaments and things,” Pipal-Keehne relates. What they found was that “traditional ornaments and cards in the [early] 1900s did not have a wide range of inclusion. So, we had to custom make all of that artwork.”
Guests wandering the aisles and perusing the windows of Plaza Point will find Santas of color, a rainbow variety of fat-cheeked cherubs, and elegantly dressed Victorian ladies from diverse backgrounds—at least two of them arm in arm. “We really push the envelope on diversity, equity, and inclusion in this area,” Pipal-Keehne says. Plaza Point, she adds, is “probably the one thing I’m the proudest of to date.”
Also joining the franchise is Laura San Giacomo, who plays La Befana—also known as the Christmas Witch! “La Befana is the Christmas Witch who comes on the Epiphany, which is January 6 in the Italian tradition,” San Giacomo told us. “She brings sweets and candy to the good little boys and girls in a sock or stocking and coal to the ones who have not been so good.” How does one prepare to play a literal witch? For San Giacomo, it involved not just a lot of research into Italian fables and history: “I also watched a lot of Italian cooks cooking to get into the mood.”
