Disneyland Babylon: Warm holiday greetings!

(Exclusive! Tabloid Baby’s 2005 Person of the Year!)


Thanks, folks at Disneyland, for offering us up a tidbit so soon after we inaugurated our Disneyland Babylon updates.

Today, a fire! A near-disaster at the Disneyland Grand Californian Hotel. It’s a huge, wooden Arts & Crafts style place, like the kind you might see in Yosemite, with a large lobby overlooked by scary, hope-nobody-falls balconies. As the website says, in that lobby, "a stately fireplace combining stone, tile and ironwork takes center stage. The continuously burning fire is the perfect gathering spot." Not this time!

We’ve stayed there. The Grand Californian has an entrance right onto the Downtown Disney shopping plaza, a nice pool out back, and has lots of nice wide polished wooden stairways. Wooden. And oh, what a mighty tragedy it would have been, had that Christmas tree set all that wood ablaze.

Merry Christmas, Mickey!

L.A. Times website
Dec. 28, 2005

Christmas Tree
Catches Fire
at Disneyland Hotel

From Associated Press

A 35-foot Christmas tree caught fire in the lobby of the Disneyland Resort's Grand Californian Hotel early today but nobody suffered serious injury.

The hotel's sprinkler system kept the 3 a.m. blaze in check and firefighters were able to quickly put it out, said Maria Sabol, a spokeswoman for the Anaheim Fire Department. The fire started after employees changed some light bulbs on the tree and turned them back on, Sabol said...

The 745-room hotel in the heart of the California Adventure theme park was at full capacity with about 2,300 guests, said Rob Doughty, the resort's vice president of communications. They were evacuated to three locations in and around the park…

One to two feet of water from firefighters' hoses pooled on the hotel floor, damaging carpet, floor and furniture around the tree, Sabol said...

Guest Lee Crice of Phoenix told KTLA-TV that he saw the top six feet of the tree ablaze as he fled through the hotel lobby after being awakened by the fire alarm. Firefighters sprayed water on the artificial tree and gray smoke wafted through the cavernous lobby… Two guests were treated at the scene for minor injuries and released...