Our Elf Adventure with Grapevine’s Christmas Passport was an eventful holiday-themed experience. All the events for the passport, plus the Holiday train, Vetro Studio, and Snowy Christmas Forest are located in the Christmas Village.
Grapevine’s Living History Shops
In the Christmas village, there are several living history shops. Our first stop was the Historic Cotton Belt Depot to purchase our Christmas Passport. The simulation of Christmas in the past made the experience of creating classic keepsake ornaments, bookmarks, and tags for our Elf Adventure even more endearing.
Our Elf Adventure with Grapevine’s Christmas Passport
4 Elf Adventure Activities are included in the passport
1) Cotton Belt Route Section Foreman House
Decorate a wooden Christmas train ornament in the Foreman House. They provided colored pencils for coloring the ornaments. My three boys wanted to decorate their trains with glitter, beads, and paint so we decorated them at home instead of at the Foreman House.
2) Tin Shop
As a child, I remember adding tinsel to our Christmas tree.
The idea of tinsel can be dated back to 1610, Nuremberg, Germany. Tinsel made from strands of real silver where added to trees to reflect the light of the candles in their trees.
In the Tin Shop at the Bragg House, you can help create a real metal tinsel ornament for your tree.
3) Historic Cotton Belt Depot
Inside the Historic Cotton Belt Depot, you pick out beads to design and create a Christmas bookmark.
4) Blacksmith Shop
Stamp a brass luggage or gift tag at the Millican’s Blacksmith Shop.
Elf Adventure with Grapevine’s Christmas Passport
The Elf Adventure is still happening, starting at 11am, daily, until Thursday, December 23, 2021. Purchase the Christmas Passports inside the Cotton Belt Railroad Historic District, 705 S. Main St. Grapevine, TX, 76051. This is also the location for Grapevine’s Vintage Railroads. The North Pole Express Holiday train.
Christmas Passports for the Elf Adventure are $8 a passport. If you don’t want to do every activity in the passport, you can pick a few for $3 per individual activity. My three boys enjoyed stamping the tags in the Blacksmith shop so much that we bought three additional activity tickets to add to their passport so that they could make two tags. However, I would say the stamping is probably more enjoyable for older kids. All kids can do it, but to really get a proper stamp on the tags you have to be hammer strong.
Snowy Christmas Forest
All the shops for the Elf Adventure events are next to each other within the Christmas Village. In the middle of the Christmas Village and next to the railroad is a fun little Snowy Christmas Forest. It was “snowing” so hard, my boys could barely see! We LOVED it!
Grapevine Parking locations include:
Last year, I took my boys all over DFW, Dallas, Texas to look at Holiday Lights, “40 Most Spectacular Drive-Thru Christmas Lights in Dallas.”
The year before that, we spent some time visiting Hallmark Christmas Towns in Texas. Like this one!
This year, I decided to spend a little extra time exploring Grapevine, Texas. After all, Grapevine is “The Christmas Capital of Texas.”
