Lifestyle
Disneyland's holiday fest dazzles with Latin traditions and a candlelit 'Silent Night'
One of the Disneyland Resort’s new holiday offerings is a show featuring the young guitar-slinging character of Miguel from “Coco.” But it’s ultimately rooted in a culture and history that long predates the 2017 film.
Show director Tobi Longo pulled from her childhood, her family roots and a cultural heritage in working with her peers to bring the mariachi-focused performance to life. In turn, its primary influence was not the Disney/Pixar film, but Las Posadas. The latter — think a festive procession that travels among the community — are traditionally staged in Mexico between Dec. 16 and 24. In their purest form, Las Posadas depict the biblical story of Joseph and Mary and the search for shelter at the time of Jesus’ birth.
The Disney performance deviates from the religious overtunes. But some of the key touchstones — a mix of music and stories, a centering of children with candles — are present. The early evening weekday show, officially dubbed “A Musical Christmas with Mariachi Alegría de Disneyland & Miguel,” is part of this year’s expanded programming for Disney California Adventure’s Festival of Holidays, now a nearly decade-long tradition that focuses its events on the cultures that Disney films represent rather than the films themselves.
While the guitar-slinging character of Miguel from “Coco” makes an appearance in a new Disneyland Resort holiday show, the performance is simply inspired by the world of the film, rather than retelling its narrative.
(Joshua Sudock / Disneyland Resort)
In that sense, Festival of Holidays taps into the original mission of Disneyland, that is, presenting an aspirational view of society that looks as much as the world beyond its gates as it does the fantasies held inside them.
Longo, asked about the inspiration behind the show, spoke of her upbringing.
“My grandfather was going to become a priest at the San Gabriel Mission, and he met my grandma and didn’t go that route,” Longo says. “But my family participated in Las Posadas, and in San Gabriel there was a blue line painted on the ground and everyone would follow it, and it was a big tradition for the Mexican Catholic community. I always dressed up as an angel and had a little candle.
“I remember beautiful lanterns and candles and people processing and depicting different characters from the Christmas story,” Longo continues. “So when they talked about doing a sing-along and a processional, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be beautiful if we took inspiration from that?’”
Dancers holding glistening, star-like lanterns lead a musical stroll to the main hub of Disney California Adventure. There, a narrator and singer welcomes and regales guests with tales of how different Latin countries present stories of Santa Claus, or, say, the joy of unwrapping a tamale.
Popular carols — “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town,” “Jingle Bells” — are presented bilingually, and while the performance is building to an appearance from Miguel, the climax instead is serene, a candlelit rendition of “Silent Night,” with audience participation. What a moment ago was festive theme park fare becomes something more reflective, all while slightly nodding to the holiday’s more spiritual underpinnings.
“Bringing children up and giving them a candle — I was thinking if that would be controllable?” Longo says. “But the kids get into it and are almost hypnotized by the candle. It turned out to be very sweet, but it’s fun and lively and kind of teaches people a little bit about the Mexican culture and their traditions around Christmastime.”
Such an approach has become a mission of Festival of Holidays.
(Christian Thompson / Disneyland Resort)
Disney, says Susana Tubert, creative director of the resort’s live entertainment, has significantly increased the amount of acts it features for the event, which runs through Jan. 6. Musical groups touch on jazz, klezmer, reggae, polka, gospel and more, as the festivities strive to reflect Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and other cultural traditions, this year delves deeper into Southern California’s Filipino and Aztec communities.
It’s a doubling down on diverse and inclusive programming, making Festival of Holidays feel timely, lively and even risk-taking, especially when Disneyland could simply lean on its popular films and fairy tales and avoid the sometimes politicized scrutiny that can come with multicultural programming.
It’s reflective of an approach that has been happening resort-wide. The Walt Disney Co. in recent years has been taking a broad view of its theme parks, looking at places to increase diversity or remove outdated stereotypes. See, for instance, the recent change from Splash Mountain to Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, or tweaks to such classics as the Jungle Cruise to bring the attraction up to modern sensibilities. Coming soon: An update to Disneyland’s Peter Pan’s Flight to remove caricatures of Native Americans.
“Representation — I think it’s so important,” says Disneyland’s Paul David Bryant, who helps orchestrate Festival of Holidays, focusing heavily on its musical performances.
“And I think that’s exactly what it is we here at the Disneyland Resort are going for,” he continues. “We want to make sure when I, or you or Tobi walks into the park, hopefully we can see someone who looks like us. We are a small world. It makes me feel good when I walk out there and see all these different cultures. When I walk out and see a Kwanzaa group singing R&B that sounds like gospel and is talking about a Disney tune, it takes me on a journey.”
A journey, adds Bryant, about expanding and opening guests’ views of the world. “You get to walk in, and walk out knowing more than you walked in knowing,” he says.
This year for Festival of Holidays, there are three signature shows. Joining the mariachi performance is a new weekday afternoon tale that uses the songs of “Encanto,” only reframing them into one about the frenzied festivities of getting ready for Christmas. It does so while alluding to the film’s Colombian influences.
The two new entertainment offerings join the long-running “¡Viva Navidad!” street parade featuring the Donald Duck-led Three Caballeros. “¡Viva Navidad!” runs on weekends and serves as a folksy event that from beginning to end is a boisterous celebration of Latin art and music, complete with folklórico dancers and mariachis as well as 12-foot-tall mojiganga puppets, that is, large-scale, papier-mâché sculptures.
The new daytime holiday show “Mirabel’s Gifts of the Season” builds up to a large Cumbia finale.
(Disneyland Resort)
“Mirabel’s Gifts of the Season” builds up to a large Cumbia finale, with an actor playing “Encanto” protagonist Mirabel trying to teach the audience some dance moves. Throughout, the show humorously captures the hectic nature of decorating and cooking for a Christmas gathering, with the characters sometimes having to make the most out of a little, such as a hastily constructed Christmas tree.
While using a number of songs from the film, the performance isn’t a retelling of it. The show even attempts to re-center the tunes, such as using “All of You” as a borderline ballad for lighting holiday candles.
“Colombia is one of the founding homes of magical realism of Latin America,” Tubert says. “So even the fact that Mirabel crafts this little tree out of sticks and sees it as her Christmas tree is part of that poetry of the everydayness that makes magical realism what it is. We go there. We take ourselves into Colombia and say, ‘What makes this authentic?’ Our dialect coach is giving us perfect accents for Colombia.”
“Mirabel’s Gifts of the Season” show director Linda Love Simmons says Tubert challenges the team to think beyond just creating a performance that serves as references to the film, even while acknowledging audiences would probably be happy to simply sing along to the songs that they know. Notes Tubert: “It would be the low-hanging fruit to do a sing-along, but that’s already on Disney+.”
“Early on, it was, ‘Let’s do a sing-along,” confesses Simmons. “Susana and I go, ‘We can do better.’
“Susana always says to me, ‘You’re a better storyteller than that.’ So it causes me to dig deep down. … We did a lot of digging and a lot of crafting. But the most important thing is we wanted to create a feeling — when people watch it, that they relate to the characters and feel something. That’s what we get to do intrinsically in musical theater. Normally everything in a theme park is like, ‘Fast!’ But three-quarters of the way through, we bring it all the way down and sing ‘All of You’ and pass a candle.”
The Festival of Holidays lasts just a few weeks, but it also is making an impact on Disneyland year-round. Tubert, for instance, says that the mariachi band that leads the “Coco” show — Mariachi Alegría de Disneyland — will be sticking around past the holiday season. Expect them to become part of the resort’s musical offerings, she teases.
“This is part of the tapestry of diversity that Disneyland represents,” Tubert says. “This is who we are.”
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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