Do you have your Christmas tree up yet? I got my artificial tree and boxes of ornaments out of the closet but haven’t set them up yet. The LEGO City Advent Calendar‘s Christmas tree is here though…
This is pretty much standard fare for LEGO Advent calendar trees. The central core is made with 1×1 bricks with studs on all sides (“Travis bricks”) and each side of the tree is identical except for some variation on color for the lights (red on two sides, yellow on the others). You can see how it’s done by looking at the instructions:
These instructions on the LEGO Advent calendars sometimes can get really tricky. Instead of multi-step instructions as with normal LEGO sets, you just get one image to work from. And you can see from this that you almost have to guess what’s going to go on the “back” sides, but if you really squint you can kind of make out the hint of yellow and red visible around the edges from the back sides. These models are sometimes more like solving a puzzle than building from instructions, which I find more enjoyable but I imagine small children may find it frustrating. However, when I was a kid, there was a lot more of a challenge building regular sets – if you look at the Classic Space sets from the late 1970s and early 1980s for example, those instructions often were a bit of a puzzle to spot the new pieces and where they went, and it wasn’t unusual to have to place multiple pieces on top of each other within a single step. So I guess if I could do it when I was a kid, then it’s fine?
