I have been thinking a lot about the perennial problem that both BGW and KD confront each year: how to take down their Halloween events and set up their holiday events in time. Especially with both parks reducing the time they have, it seems like an issue that isn’t going to fix itself.
This year, as we were wandering through Festa at HOS, and commenting on how little carnival theming there really was and how tiny the scare zone had become, an idea came to me: what if BGW could use the extensive CT decorations for HOS, as well? I thought this would have two benefits: it would reduce changeover time between HOS and CT, and it would provide the park with a complete Festa overlay for Halloween.
Before I go any further, let me apologize in advance, as I am sure I am going to offend some people with the premise of this concept. Hopefully, we can all agree to disagree and just focus on the mechanism, if not the target.
So. I have always felt that Holiday Hills was fairly creepy and not a little trashy. When the bulbs start burning out, this impression is just magnified. I find the huge Santa billboards and masks disturbing and the music to be in questionable taste. The now gone retro advertisements were kinda terrifying, as well.
I think that with very little effort, all of the Holiday Hills decorations could be tweaked to become a great HOS hamlet, themed to creepy Christmas.I am tentatively calling it Holiday Chills.
The park would need to bring back all of the incandescent-based props and make some of the bulbs blink and leave others burned out. The Santa’s could be tweaked to be even more sinister. Darker holiday tunes could be played. I think they could create a variety of mazes that would fit the theme, like a condemned Christmas shop or a creepy toy factory.
Obviously, the Rudolf stuff would be need to be added between the events, but that would take much less work than changing over the entire hamlet.
Finding ways to use the same decor for both events might start to solve their timeline constraints.
