A unique part of Disneyland that many Walt Disney World-goers don’t get to experience is the Haunted Mansion Holiday overlay. Each year, Disneyland staff decorate the exterior and interior of the traditional Haunted Mansion ride to reflect scenes and characters from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. And each year, guests love it all the same as the rest of the park is also dolled up in spooky gear. This year in 2021, the Haunted Mansion Holiday turns 20 years old. The fun addition to the ride first opened on October 3rd, 2001.

Haunted Mansion Holiday. Image from: https://insidethemagic.net/2021/09/disneyland-magic-key-holders-haunted-mansion-holiday-ba1/

Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

Burton had been working as a Disney animator in the 1980s after his work was noticed by the company. Though he was a dedicated animator, he was also working on his own projects on the side as he came up with them. The Nightmare Before Christmas began simply as a poem in 1982 by Burton, until he was able to make a deal with Walt Disney Pictures to turn it into a full-blown film.

The film was made with stop-motion animation, something Disney had only done once prior for a TV movie. It was a great way to set apart Disney’s style and Burton’s style. For this reason as well, they released it through Touchstone Pictures, as they were concerned about the reaction of avid Disney fans.

The movie was a success, bringing in $91.5 million from the box office. The storyline followed Jack Skellington, a popular monster in Halloween Town as he stumbles across Christmas Town for the first time ever. He becomes enamored in the idea of Christmas, though he doesn’t realize what trouble it may cause. He convinces his town to start decorating for Christmas, and the real Santa Claus is kidnapped and held with Oogie Boogie. Jack, thinking he can be the new Santa Claus, is eventually shot down out of the sleigh and he realizes that he needs to stay in Halloween Town. His counterpart, Sally, tries to help him see how important he is to Halloween Town and tries to save Santa.

Nightmare Before Christmas by Tim Burton. Image from: https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/8481021/danny-elfman-nightmare-before-christmas-interview

The Idea for the Haunted Mansion Holiday

Disney has been decorating for Halloween and Christmas for several decades now, even when Walt was around the parks. In 2001 when Imagineers were dreaming up new ideas of how to decorate the park, they wondered what the Haunted Mansion would be like if Jack Skellington had decided to decorate it. With that mindset going forward, Imagineers started to think about what the mansion would end up looking like.

Tim Wollweber, an artist at Disney, said that they took inspiration from the scene where the Halloween Town folk were decorating for Christmas. This scene shows the monsters making their best attempt at making everything cheery for the holiday, but still having to use the grotesque and scary elements they had available to them.

The Haunted Mansion Holiday eventually got it’s own storyline, similar to the film’s plot. It followed Jack as he tried to spread the holiday cheer to the 999 haunts that take over the mansion for the rest of the year.

Nightmare Before Christmas, “What’s This?”. Image by: https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/What%27s_This%3F

Executing the Haunted Mansion Holiday

According to Alex Lue at Inside the Magic, in 2019 Disneyland transformed the Haunted Mansion into it’s festive overlay on September 9th, and remained there until January 6th, 2020 when all of the Christmas decorations were taken down. Meaning, the Haunted Mansion Holiday stayed up for 4 months out of the entire year in 2019, which can be controversial to those who don’t decorate for their holidays early. But, luckily, majority of Disney fans fell in love with the attraction when it opened 20 years ago, and appreciate the overlapping holidays.

This year in 2021, the Haunted Mansion closed on August 16th and reopened with the Haunted Mansion Holiday on September 3rd, and it will stay up until January 9th 2022.

The Soundtrack for the Haunted Mansion Holiday

The original film soundtrack was composed by Danny Elfman. Though it made sense to just bring in the songs from the movie, Disney hired Gordon Goodwin to compose a whole new soundtrack specially made for the ride. That soundtrack didn’t last long though, as the year after John Debney was hired to reincorporate Elfman’s songs into the ride.

Corey Burton, with no relation to Tim Burton, was chosen to be the all-new ghost host for the attraction, giving the introduction spiel to the guests in the stretching room. He attempted to recreate Paul Frees’ traditional Haunted Mansion voice, with adding anecdotes about Jack Skellington.

“Welcome my friends, to our Christmas delight. Come witness a ghoulishly glorious sight. It’s time for our holiday tale to begin. There’s no turning back now.”

— Corey Burton, Ghost Host

What You Can See in the Haunted Mansion Holiday

The Entrance

Right at the entrance of the queue, you’re greeted by the pumpkin king himself sitting on a big jack-o-lantern. The exterior of the ride is fully decorated from top to bottom with pumpkins, candles, Christmas lights, and the famous Burton-style scarecrow right at the front. At the top of the mansion you can spot Jack’s sleigh that has crashed on the roof, with his recipe for Christmas hanging out the side of it.

The Stretching Room

As you enter the attraction into the stretching room, you’ll see the regular stretching portraits are replaced with “stain glass” covers that break apart into all-new spooky portraits. A projection of Jack’s face with zero lights up at the top of the elevator as you drop down into the rest of the ride.

As you load into your “black Christmas sleighs”, you can see what is called the “Merry Scary Christmas Card” along the back wall. It’s a large structure that is built like a Christmas card, with characters from the film popping out of gift boxes each time you visited.

Zero’s Dog Bones

The ride track remains the same throughout the ride, but with each scene decorated differently to reflect the Nightmare Before Christmas. One of the first rooms, where a candelabra is normally floating around on it’s own, is now replaced with Zero’s bones and his barking in the background.

“Part of his whole gimic too is, ‘what would Jack give Zero for Christmas?’ and of course it’s dog bones.”

— Steve Davison

Madame Leota’s Room

The killer wreath with big bright red eyes, sharp teeth, and menacing moving arms looms over you as you continue. Madame Leota’s room is completely transformed into a fortune card scene. According to Steve Davison in the 2017 documentary about the Haunted Mansion Holiday, Imagineers thought about what Madame Leota would receive for Christmas. They decided on 13 fortune cards that would float around her, which would represent the 13 days of Christmas.

The Ballroom

As your sleigh enters the ballroom scene, which is a public favourite in both versions, you can see some of the ghosts are replaced with ghost “gifts” that are flying out of Jack’s crashed sleigh. The centerpiece of the ballroom was a real gingerbread house. Yes, REAL. Each year Imagineers construct an all-new gingerbread house to stand tall for 3-4 months out of the year. They also try to do something completely different every year, they’ve done a present gingerbread house, an Oogie Boogie one, and a Zero dog house one. On the left side of the ballroom, is the Spider Christmas Tree. It’s decorated with pumpkins, skulls, and candles. The original ghost dancers who appear in the mansion year-round, still remain in the ballroom dancing around the tree.

2019 Haunted Mansion Holiday gingerbread house. Image by: https://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2019/09/first-look-2019-haunted-mansion-holiday-50th-anniversary-gingerbread-house-at-disneyland-park/

The Attic

The attic scene is filled with the spooky gifts that Jack leaves behind. One of them is the snake that invades the house of a child in the movie, but in the mansion, it’s eating the naughty and nice list. The names featured on the list are production staff, some of their family members, and other key people who contributed to the theme including “Timmy B.” (Tim Burton).

The infamous Hatbox Ghost made a reappearance into this attraction in 2015.

The Graveyard

Our Jack Skellington appears in the graveyard with his dog Zero, to replace the shaking gatekeeper and starved dog.

“Welcome to our Christmas delight! Look Zero, I think they like our Christmas. ”

— Jack Skellington

The graveyard is covered in blankets of white snow, filled with more gifts around the stones, and the pop-up ghosts and band ghosts sport a Christmas hat to get into the spirit of things. Here we can finally see Sally, leaning over one of the gravestones. Sally was added into the attraction in 2016. The head busts that sing “Grim Grinning Ghosts” are replaced with pumpkin heads who sing “We Wish You a Scary Christmas”.

Pumpkin Snow Mountain

Pumpkin Snow Mountain stands tall behind the singing busts with tons of lit up jack-o-lanterns scattered throughout it. It’s the largest structure featured in the attraction. It’s also almost the end of the attraction, before you hit a big Oogie Boogie with a gambling wheel, and pop-ups of the children in the hitchhiking ghost mirrors.

Celebrating the 20th Anniversary

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of this spooky holiday overlay, one thing Imagineers really wanted to make special was the gingerbread house. Since it’s baked fresh every year with a new design, this year in 2021 they decided to mesh together different elements of all of the previous 20 years of gingerbread houses into one.