Of course we had to celebrate Christmas, even if it was a bit early, so we went to Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party.
Cinderella's Castle
Mickey's Once Upon A Christmastime Parade
Us with Scrooge McDuck
Holiday Wishes fireworks
A duck decided to take off and fly over my head part way through the fireworks. Scared the daylights out of me, therefore a few pictures are a little slanted.
Us with Cinderella Castle in the background
Cinderella Castle and Partners statue
Main Street USA
The rest of the days we wandered around and relaxed.
Downtown Disney
The Lego Store
World Of Disney
Goofy's Candy Company Store. Made out of jelly beans.
This is a huge rice cereal treat
Christmas tree and turkey caramel apples
Jay roasting marshmallows for s'mores at Chip and Dale's Sing-a-Long Campfire
Dale at the campfire
Holiday Wishes fireworks from the Fort Wilderness beach. It was pretty cloudy that night.
The Electrical Water Pageant from the Fort Wilderness Beach
Disney's electrical tower
A quick stop at Krispy Kreme for an afternoon snack
One day we went over to the Beach Club Resort. This is the gingerbread display at the Beach Club. The Yacht and Beach Engineering Team magically constructs the carousel in 5 hours. Each carousel horse takes 1 week to decorate. To commemorate the year 2009, there are 2009 pieces of gingerbread in this display.
To make the gingerbread in this display, 36 lbs of honey, 96 lbs of bread flour, 100 pints of eggs, 10 lbs of spices, 10 quarts of simple syrup, 150 lbs of icing, 50 lbs of dark chocolate, 50 lbs of modeling chocolate, and 200 gum paste flowers.
One of many Hidden Mickeys
The gingerbread store
Ariel's at the Beach Club
The pool
The Boardwalk Resort from the Beach and Yacht Club Resorts
The Yacht Club Resort
While at the Boardwalk Resort, we crashed the pool.
Jay is somewhere in the splash
Time to head home. Disney Christmas Decorating Facts
They have 24 resort, 4 parks, and Downtown Disney to decorate. There are 1300 Christmas trees around the entire Walt Disney World Resort
They use over 15 miles of garland, 300,000 yards of ribbon, 1300 wreaths, hundreds of thousands of christmas ornaments (some from previous years and some new), and at least 8.5 million christmas lights.
The Holiday Services department has a 54,000 square feet warehouse and 25 full-time cast members (which quadruples with they start Christmas decorating). They do all the decorating during the night.
The Horticultural team starts making decorations in July. They have over 4000 acres of finished landscaping to decorate. They make 200 topiaries, using over 20 different plants. They use over 100,000 poinsettias, which are all red. Most of them are put into the ground, but some of them are made into poinsettia trees, poinsettia balls, flower pots, and other decorations. A local nursery spends 50 weeks of the year growing most of the poinsettias used at the Walt Disney World Resort. There are 25,000 poinsettias planted in the Magic Kingdom, which takes 30 people 2 nights to plant.
