So, we're in the middle of the week, the first week of December, and I'm looking through our classic holiday stories.

We have a lot of them.

And I want to post up some of them this year between our new episodes each Sunday.

Right now in 2024, out at the Florida Resort, teams have dressed living with the land with endless ropes and screens

of holiday lights. This practice started a few years ago, and now all of the greenhouses, after dark at least,

are a glow with holiday magic, lights that have increased year after year until now.

Some of these displays have now been created by Disney designers in Florida,

but a lot of them are store-bought, and this ride, at least for the month of December,

now looks like another Disney holiday favorite Long Gone, called the Osborne Spectacle of Dancing Lights,

which used to blaze up each December over at the studios.

This is actually one of my favorite stories as it relates to the parks,

the story of how a neighborhood display eventually made its way from

Arkansas to Disney World. Here's hoping you enjoy it. And if you're over at Disney World this month,

make sure to check out Living with the Land after 6 p.m. as the flavors of this old display have been absorbed in some small way into this

attraction. Here we go. The hero of this story is Jennings Osborne, unless of course you were

one of his neighbors in the early 1990, who sued him for turning his neighborhood

into something that, according to court filings, resembled a theme park. In that case, he might be the

villain. But for most of us, he'll be the hero of this story. He started from humble beginnings. He was

born during the Second World War in a small town in Arkansas. He grew up

watching the weekly Disney show I Love Lucy and Kit Carson. He had a typical childhood in the 1950s.

In college, he studied business and biology at the University of Arkansas. For a while after

graduation, he worked at hospitals, but then, in 1968, he and his wife, Mitzi, started a small business, the Arkansas Research Medical Testing Center, which coordinated pharmaceutical tests with volunteers for drug-seeking FDA approval.

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