Charlie and Linus in ICE at Gaylord National

The holidays are back at Gaylord National with their annual ICE exhibit. This past weekend, we were able to visit and take a walk through A Charlie Brown Christmas. Here’s a review and some helpful information for anyone considering a visit this holiday season.

The Basics

This incredible event displays over 2 million pounds of ice, carefully hand dyed and carved to bring the scenes of A Charlie Brown Christmas to life. ICE is running daily until December 28th from 10am-9pm, with hotel guests getting an hour of early access. Along with the walk through exhibit, there is an entire Christmas Village set up inside of the convention center that features a number of individually priced experiences. Some stand out attractions include indoor snow tubing, a competitive snowball throwing game, meet and greets with Santa and other characters, and a Build-A-Bear workshop. This is an event that definitely caters to kids and families, but anyone can appreciate the artistry that goes into the Charlie Brown exhibit.

Tickets to this event are a bit pricey, most days fluctuating between $35-50 per person. As an event primarily catered toward families, that price tag can seem daunting. However, we were able to easily find promo codes through social media pages that took 30% off of our tickets. Marriott members, Military, AAA, among others all offer discounts for the event as well. It’s definitely worth spending the extra 10-20 minutes to find a discount that works for you, as it makes the visit a total win!

Review

This was our third year visiting, after seeing Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and A Christmas Story in previous visits. Personally, I think this was the most successful version of the exhibit that we’ve seen. The simplistic art style of the Charlie Brown cartoons lends itself very well to these ice sculptures, they looked the most like the movie they were representing. Depending on your tolerance to extreme cold, you could spend close to an hour inside of the film scenes taking in all of the story beats and details. They give you lots of opportunities to interact with the scenes, which seems like an incredible engineering feat considering our body heat is actively fighting the ice.

The scale of the carvings are incredible, with some of them being multiple stories high. Specifically, a scene that takes you through a fully built school façade and through the hallway with lockers and doorways was particularly impressive, leading into the gymnasium where you encounter five different ridable slides made entirely of ice. The staggered entry times mean that you can go down the slides as many times as you would like with little to no waiting.

After Charlie Brown, you encounter a few more rooms dedicated to more traditional ice carvings. Possibly my favorite moment of the entire experience was watching one of the sculptors create an elephant right before our eyes from a solid block of ice. If I could give a suggestion (if there’s anyone from ICE reading this), having this sculptor at the beginning of the exhibit would probably be a more effective use of their talents than at the very end. We noticed a lot of kids not really understanding why they were in this freezing cold tent with a giant uncomfortable jacket on (lots of frozen tears are left in Snoopy’s wake). Showing the sculptor working right up front would give them the appropriate context to understand why they are doing what they're doing, and maybe help them to appreciate it a bit more.

So stay warm this holiday season, unless of course you voluntarily brave the 9 degree temperatures of ICE now through December 28th!