Like last year, LEGO came up with two advent calendars, only one of which was sold in the U.S. The 7687 City advent calendar was sold everywhere, but the 6299 Pirates calendar was only available in Europe. (If you’re not familiar with advent calendars, they basically consist of 24 different gifts, one to be opened on each day of Advent, the traditional Christian season that precedes Christmas, or in other words December 1-24. These days, it’s secularized – fine by me, since I’m not religious – but the name has stuck.)
Last year, LEGO accidentally shipped a few sets of that year’s specialty calendar, which had a Castle theme, to the U.S. Shop-At-Home warehouse, and since the fans were complaining so loudly about it not being available in this country they were convinced to make them available through a special mail-order setup. But we didn’t have any such luck this year with the Pirates calendar, so unless you had a friend in Europe willing to ship it to you, there was no way to get it.
Well, my friend Holger Matthes in Germany was willing to do this favor for me, and I was hoping to get it in time for December 1st so I could post each day’s set like I did last year (each of those words is a link to a different day’s calendar from last year; days 1-7 and 24 are shown, but I bet you can find the rest). But alas, the package took a long time getting here (not Holger’s fault; he shipped it as soon as I gave him the details – but DHL took its sweet time in delivering it. Next time I’ll pay extra for airmail/express, or just order sooner. Though hopefully LEGO will have learned its lesson and won’t require me to jump through such hoops…)
If you want to see more clever coverage of the Advent calendars than I can provide, check out Chris Doyle’s Reasonably Clever blog where he’s included each day’s calendar prizes into the BRiCK House web comic.
Anyway, I didn’t get the Pirates calendar until December 18th, so I put photos on Flickr of the first 19 days the next day and have updated it today with the rest. You can see the City and Pirates sets for each day in my 2009 Advent Calendars set (or view as a slideshow).
I was surprised to see that both calendars had the days in the same quasi-random order. It made it easy to build them side-by-side; once I found that day’s door in one calendar, the other calendar had the same number in the same position. It did seem to me that all the doors were printed upside-down; the flap of the box was in the way if you tried to open the doors with the printing facing right-side-up. Last year, the direction of the printing was opposite on the two boxes, if I recall correctly.
Like last year I bought both of them, and multiples of the Euro exclusive- I sent quite a lot to both friends and customers across the Atlantic pond!
I don’t think for a second though that the Pirate calendar is anywhere as good as the Castle one the previous year. A lot of the pieces and elements in it were already pretty readily available, compared to the witch/jester/peasant figs of the Castle calendar. That said, I think it was still a lot better than the City iteration, which I feel has been getting worse every year.
Merry Christmas!
I agree, last year’s Castle calendar was much better, especially in terms of the minifigs. Still, I enjoyed the Pirates one.
I like the bench on day 15, fountain on day 18, and Xmas tree on day 23 of the City calendar. Can I borrow those instruction sheets?
The instructions are really just pictures of the models, so there’s not much to borrow. But I haven’t yet put the boxes into the recycling, so you can have them if you want….
Hello Bill,
I didn’t bother any friends in Europe for my Pirate advent calendar. I just bought my mine on Bricklink. I wanted to suggest that to anyone who finds this in the future years. (But I see now you have a Bricklink store, maybe next year you can import some for us from your friend in Germany :) )
Your site was recommended to me by Google Reader but I see you are probably local to me in Palo Alto. If you haven’t recycled those boxes yet, I’d love to take them apart to scan the “instructions” for Peeron. I don’t want to take my own boxes apart but I’ve seen in previous years others have scanned the box images for later reference.
In any case, I’m glad I found your Bay Area LEGO blog. I’ll have to take my kids to the BayLUG Museum Show, I hadn’t heard about it until I saw it here. My own LEGO life story can be found here: http://carlstrom.com/lego/
I also have the Spirit of St Louis from my youth:
http://carlstrom.com/lego/inventory/set/456/
I would have sworn those were not stickers myself!
-bri