St. Louis’ best holiday event for small kids is a giant alcohol factory

The first in an occasional series of irreverent reviews designed to help people navigate St. Louis in all its quirky glory.

When you’re the parent of small children, the holidays are an indescribably magical time of year. Except for all the times, of course, when they’re not. Like when your two-year-old is using a TV remote to bash your deceased grandmother’s tree ornaments into a fine powder, or when his older brother is screaming “Jingle Bells” into a toy megaphone with an unbelievably long battery life.

The non-magical aspects of Christmas are often enhanced by the subarctic temperatures that effectively eliminate the availability of outdoor kid-friendly activities, forcing everyone to remain inside while trading various illnesses back and forth in an endless cycle of fevers and snot, while the walls of the house somehow creep in closer and closer.

Fortunately, for the month of December at least, St. Louis offers a number of holiday-themed events worth leaving the house for; however, too few of them are geared specifically towards families with uptight dads and very small children. Some of them are too crowded, others are way too expensive, and then there are the ones where you just pay for the privilege of idling in traffic to look at Christmas decorations from the 1980s.

But there is one single family event that is miraculously designed for adults just as much as it is for little kids, and, ironically enough, it’s hosted at a beer factory.

The first thing that happens when you enter the Anheuser-Busch Brewery Lights festival is that someone immediately hands you a beer. This is something that should be happening at every place I go to around the holidays. If I’m walking into a Target with two little kids, someone should be handing me a beer. Schnucks? Beer. Airport? Five beers. It’s a disarming tactic that gets you into a festive spirit right away, and also helps you not scream at your kids when they’ve just tackled each other through a seven foot tall ice sculpture of Baby Jesus (or maybe it was a polar bear, or a small building).

And the fun enters your bloodstream even before that beer does. You’re met outside the visitor’s center with the songs of carolers. Once inside the center, there’s plenty of family photo ops to take with your kids while they’re still sort of behaving, and s’mores booths outside to bribe them with if they aren’t. There are then fire pits to cook those s’mores at, just before you begin your walk down the eponymous light display of the main brewery road. 

But the attraction that really sets Brewery Lights apart from the other so-called kid-friendly events in the city is that it actually has an entire area specifically designed for little kids. This area is huge, and is basically an entire alley on the brewery campus that’s just one big Christmas party for children. It’s got a big light-up interactive disco-tiled platform for kids to jump around on like maniacs. It has a cute little golf cart train ride. It even has some free carnival rides that parents can get on as well, like those spinning bears people are always puking on at school picnics.

The thing in this zone that the kids really seem to go nuts for, though, is the Munchkin Radio dance party that occurs at the top of every hour. It’s basically a 30-minute children’s rave where a skinny dude in a bright red suit teaches everyone different dances like “Santa Shark,” and then gives the best dancers small prizes like slime that you’ll find caked on your kids’ car seats the next day.

The only issue I had with the kid area is that it’s located in some sort of wind tunnel, so whatever temperature your phone says it is outside, it’s about 15 degrees colder in this specific location. This chill factor can also work to a parent’s benefit, though, as it can make it slightly easier to convince your kid that it’s time to leave, or at the very least it’s time to move on to a different area where they have baked pretzels.

Timing is a factor, too. The best time slot to reserve with little kids is 5 p.m. At that point, the crowd is very thin, you don’t have to wait in a line for really anything, and no one in attendance has had enough time to get drunk enough to make a big scene that you have to explain away to your kids. Plus, there’s a lively yet graciously quick parade down the main road at 7:30, which is a perfect note to leave on.

Now the best part of the event for me, a person who pretty much only thinks about money, is the price. It’s only $12 an adult, and that includes that “free” beer from earlier. The price for my kids, who are both under the age of five? Zero dollars. My kids were completely free. I didn’t have to pay a single cent for them to have a blast, which is a parent’s dream. There were also some upgrade options like a VIP area, but those options seem more adult-friendly, especially the $75 Speakeasy option, which I have zero information on, but I assume at some point you drink elf blood.

Before you ask, no I am not on the payroll of Anheuser-Busch or Inbev or affiliated with them in any way. I don’t really even drink any of their products. I’m just a parent like you who is desperate to take his small and exceptionally loud children to places during Christmas where they’ll make memories and not get the flu, and for whatever reason, that place in St. Louis is a giant factory where they make alcohol.