Thanks to the politics of our 27th state, traveling to Florida is something that gives me pause. The bigotry that's been pressed into policy is pretty disgusting, and has resulted in hate crimes exploding. It's so bad that actual travel advisories have been issued.

Though I'm in Walt Disney World, which is kind of a bubble unto its own, and makes any politics feel a world away.

Hey, weren't you in Disney World just a year ago? you might be asking?

Yes. Which you might remember from the two weeks of blog posts I dumped on Blogography (starting here).

Except I'm not here for Disney World, that's just something to do before the reason I'm here.

Tonight was spent at Magic Kingdom because it's time once again for Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party. An overtly shameless cash-grab by Disney. It's an after-hours event which has special food, merch, parades, characters, and other stuff... along with free hot cocoa and cookies. And magical projections on the castle as a Christmas stage show plays below...

Plus fireworks, of course...

Disney also advertises that you get to enjoy the attractions with shorter lines, but they oversell the event so badly that it's hardly the case. Lines were actually shorter during the day.

Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party is a separately-ticketed event which doesn't require a regular park ticket. If you pay to do it, then you get to enter the park at 4:00 and everybody who doesn't pay to do it has to leave by 6:00. As you might imagine, those two hours of overlap is crowded and crazy. Once the park can be reasonably sure that all the regular ticket riff-raff is gone, they start unleashing all the Christmas specialty stuff around 7:00 and keep it going until midnight.

I've never really found any of the after-hours events to be worth it. But I end up going to many of them anyway for something to do when I was working in Orlando. Plus the specialty foods are interesting. And my mom loved it, so I brought her along when I was there while the Christmas party was going...

If nothing else, you get to see Space Mountain lit up in Christmas colors...

And now I'm cold and dead tired and need to get to bed.