Monday, December 25, 2017

After-Action Report: Festival of Holidays

A short one this time—I'm still working on getting back on track, and you don't want to waste hours of your Christmas reading my barely-coherent ramblings.

Last year, our Christmastime Disneyland visit turned out to be more of Christmastime California Adventure visit, because the new Festival of Holidays event proved so engaging. We didn't even visit the food kiosks due to lack of funds, but I got a good review of World of Color: Season of Light out of it, so it wasn't a total loss.
This year...it happened again. And this time we did try some of the food offerings. More on that in a bit, but for now, I want to focus on what a good idea the Festival of Holidays is in general. Guys? Management guys? This is how you leverage your California theme to provide quality entertainment while still pulling in the money you love so much. If there's one thing we Californians pride ourselves on, it's our multicultural savvy.* This state boasts an extremely high level of ethnic and cultural diversity, and by and large we embrace it.

The Festival of Holidays acknowledges no fewer than five holiday traditions: Christmas, Diwali (a Hindu lantern festival usually falling in November), Hannukah, Kwanzaa, and Navidad—which is, yes, simply what Christmas is called in Mexico, but the distinctiveness of the Mexican traditions, and the high population of Mexican immigrants in California, make it well worth treating separately. Each holiday is identified on the food kiosks and other installations with a Mickey Mouse icon bearing a colorful design typical of the originating culture:



These icons appear as ornaments in the evergreen garlands on the kiosks, as well as on the menus—Christmas for familiar fare, Diwali for Indian cuisine, Hanukkah for dishes popular with Jewish families, Kwanzaa for Southern recipes and other foods traditional in African-American subcultures, and Navidad for Mexican goodies. The kiosks themselves each offer about three different things to try, plus drinks and maybe a sweet treat. This blog gives the list of individual kiosks, though not their menus.
We were on a budget and could only try a few dishes, but they were well worth it. I went for brisket on a bed of lightly cooked carrot sticks, asparagus with bacon and feta cheese, and a Yule log mini-cake—nothing too challenging, but also not stuff I have at home. I kept thinking it would have been delightful to be there on a five-day vacation, eating in accordance with a different holiday each day.
The food is only part of it, of course. There's also live music, ranging from mariachi to klezmer to a cappella, reinforcing the cultural roots of the five holidays. Between performances, you can also hang out and enjoy a special area loop assembled for the occasion, featuring a similar range of genres and styles:


So on the whole, a fine time.

I don't want to just leave it there, so I'll close with some photos of the Christmas decorations around California Adventure. If I'd been more prolific with posting this season, I'd have dedicated an entire post to dissecting the way said decorations express the area themes, the way I did a while back with Disneyland, but again, I want to keep this one pretty short.
Buena Vista Street has the most “conventional” decorations, but even so, the dominant evergreen is juniper rather than pine or fir. There's actually a lot of juniper in the wreaths and garlands of California Adventure, which I consider just ducky because it gives it that semi-desert twist. The other thing to point out here are the giant colored light bulbs. If the Carousel of Progress has taught us one thing, it's that electric appliances really took off in the 1920s, and I bet that's when Christmas lights like this made the scene. People probably thought they were just the bee's knees:


In Hollywood Land, conversely, the garlands are made of 100% tinsel. Get it?


Another Christmas icon that makes perfect sense here is of course the star:


The bridge in Pacific Wharf is decorated with these charmingly nautical “wreaths”:


I really like the garlands on the Little Mermaid facade, especially the way they change in composition from bottom to top, like we're looking at marine life zones:


Along the back of Paradise Pier, we're back to juniper, with an odd red-yellow-blue color scheme to the ornaments. I'm not sure it works, to be honest:


The west side of the Pier is all dressed up for ¡Viva Navidad! and goes for broke with bright colors and papel picado banners:



The decorations in Grizzly Peak Airfield are pretty convincing as being literally strung together from stuff people might already have on hand while camping: strings of popcorn and cranberries, and ornaments made from punched food cans:


Merry Christmas to all my followers! If I have any left! See you next year!



* Whether said pride is actually justified...let's just leave a pin in that for now, shall we?

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