Short answer: yes — on one of the two rides. The NAUGHTY Holiday Light Trolley Ride is a BYOB tour, which means the bottle of bubbly or the six-pack of your favourite Minnesota brewery comes aboard with you. What it does not mean is meeting strangers in the back of a bar and hauling a cooler across an icy parking lot. Here is how it actually works, and what the difference is between the two December rides.
Yes, it is BYOB — and you board inside a mansion
Plenty of BYOB light tours check you in at a bar, a hotel lobby or a lot behind a strip mall. The Minneapolis Holiday Light Ride does something better: your evening starts inside the Pillsbury Club, the Charles S. Pillsbury mansion at 100 East 22nd Street. It was built between 1912 and 1914 to a Hewitt and Brown design in English Gothic Revival stone, and it is on the City of Minneapolis register of local landmarks.
So instead of standing outside in a Minnesota December waiting for a bus, you arrive early, wander a house with 45-odd rooms of oak panelling and carved stone, order a cocktail or a plate of something warm, and then step straight from the front hall onto a heated vintage trolley. Free parking sits right across the street.
Naughty or Nice: two very different evenings
NAUGHTY (21 and over, BYOB, about two hours)
This is the rolling holiday party. Start with a drink inside the club, bring your own aboard, and spend two hours winding through the Twin Cities’ best displays with Christmas music, festive lighting and a guide who knows which blocks go completely overboard. December 2026 dates are currently listing at about $69 a seat. It has quietly become the default plan for date nights, girls’ nights and office parties that nobody wants to hold in a conference room.
NICE (all ages, about an hour)
The family ride runs about an hour and lists around $27. Guests vote for their favourite decorated house along the way, there is narration and holiday music, and before or after the ride you can browse the Pillsbury Club holiday market — handmade gifts from more than fifty Minnesota artists. Grandparents do well on this one. So do kids who fall asleep somewhere around the third street of inflatable reindeer.
Why a heated trolley beats your own car
Anyone who has tried to do a lights loop by car knows the problem: one person drives, nobody agrees on the route, and the good displays are in neighbourhoods you would never think to turn into. On the trolley, no one navigates and no one is the designated driver. If you would rather not get behind the wheel at all in December, we wrote a whole guide to seeing Minneapolis holiday lights without driving.
What you will actually see
Routes shift through the season to chase whatever is looking best that week, so no two rides are quite identical. Expect residential displays that residents plan all autumn, beautifully decorated historic streets, downtown lights and a few landmarks you have driven past a hundred times without seeing lit. Meet Minneapolis keeps a useful running roundup of the best holiday lights in Minneapolis if you want to add a walking stop, and Holidazzle on Nicollet Mall is an easy pairing on a weekend afternoon before an evening ride.
Stay where the lights are
The nicest version of this evening does not end with a drive home. 300 Clifton is the Eugene J. Carpenter Mansion in Loring Park — listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977, named a Minneapolis landmark, and generally considered the finest Georgian house in the state. Eugene Carpenter chaired the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts from 1911 to 1922, the organisation that became the Minneapolis Institute of Art, which is why we call the place the birthplace of the arts in Minneapolis.
It is a short ride from the trolley’s departure point, and the four-season hot tub in the garden is an unreasonably good way to end a night of looking at lights in the cold. If you are in town for longer than a weekend — a December work stretch, a family visit that outgrows a hotel room — Oakland’s on 9th has furnished month-to-month studios downtown. And if your trip runs to the end of the month, here is where to stay for New Year’s Eve in Minneapolis.
Book it before the good nights go
December weekends sell out first, and the NAUGHTY ride tends to go before the NICE one. Pick your night on the Holiday Light Ride page, then book a room at 300 Clifton and let the whole evening happen within a few blocks. Bring your own drinks. We will handle the heat, the route and the parking.
Keep reading: Can You Do a Photo Shoot at a Historic Minneapolis Mansion?