Building a brighter tomorrow with LEGO® bricks

Happy St. Patrick’s Day

March 17th is St. Patrick’s Day, the day when just about everyone in the U.S. claims to be at least a little bit Irish, which means wearing green clothing and often imbibing copious amounts of beer with green food coloring added, especially when it falls on a weekend. (There’s very little to do with saints involved.) And more to the point, images of leprechauns.

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Advent 2014

The time has come for my annual tradition of blogging each day of LEGO’s Advent calendars. This year again we have three calendars, for Friends, Star Wars, and City. I selected winners afterwards, rating the best and worst models across all three calendars. As usual, each post was originally a separate blog entry, starting with Day 1, and continuing with a daily post about that day’s advent models. However, to clean up the site, I’ve condensed all those daily posts to a single post per year. Here’s the 2014 edition.

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Advent 2013

December is here, and it’s time for another round of LEGO Advent Calendars. This year we have three calendars: Friends (set# 41016), City (60024), and Star Wars (75023). This was the year the Star Wars calendar was based on Clone Wars, which I wasn’t very familiar with. As usual, each post was originally a separate blog entry, starting with Day 1, and continuing with a daily post about that day’s advent models. However, to clean up the site, I’ve condensed all those daily posts to a single post per year. Here’s the 2013 edition.

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Advent 2012

2012 was the first year LEGO made a Friends Advent Calendar, joining City and Star Wars for three calendars total. As usual, each post was originally a separate blog entry, starting with Day 1, and continuing with a daily post about that day’s advent models. However, to clean up the site, I’ve condensed all those daily posts to a single post per year. Here’s the 2012 edition.

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Advent 2011

2011 was the first year LEGO made a Star Wars Advent Calendar, so I was building both City and Star Wars this time around. As usual, each post was originally a separate blog entry, starting with Day 1, and continuing with a daily post about that day’s advent models. However, to clean up the site, I’ve condensed all those daily posts to a single post per year. Here’s the 2011 edition.

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Advent 2009

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.)

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Advent 2008

This year was the first time I blogged about the Advent Calendars, a tradition I continued most years through 2024. At the time, there was a lot of sturm und drang on Lugnet.com about how the Castle calendar was only being made available in Europe, until LEGO offered it here eventually as mentioned in the Day 1 post. Each post was originally a separate blog entry, starting with Day 1, and continuing with a daily post about that day’s advent models. However, to clean up the site, I’ve condensed all those daily posts to a single post per year. Here’s the 2008 edition.

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Santa’s Sleigh with Rudolph and the Reindeer by Vincent Pace

Every year LEGO comes out with an Advent calendar (or two) and most years they include some form of Santa Claus and his sleigh. But usually the sleigh is barely big enough to fit a minifig, much less a load of toys and goodies, and the “reindeer” is actually a single minifig-scale dog with no antlers or anything.

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