Building a brighter tomorrow with LEGO® bricks
I’m playing catch-up on the Advent calendars, having started blogging on December 4th. This is the fourth entry and that brings us up to date (though it’s now after midnight as I write this, so we’re into day 5).
In Friends, we get skis and ski poles, which makes sense. Star Wars brings us a micro Star Destroyer, okay. But in City we have …. stairs? And a magic wand? What is this for?
Day three in the Advent calendars brings us a Christmas tree, a decorative lamp with an ornamental sprig of green, and some kind of Gungan catapult thingy.
I had to double-check the boxes to confirm that the Friends set gives us the lamp, and the City set gives us the tree. The oval shield in trans-purple with the printing on it in the Star Wars set is a really neat part. I really like the streetlamp design, but the tree is a pretty common design – every year there’s one very much like this in the Advent calendar set(s).
The second door in each of our LEGO Advent Calendar sets gives us Jar Jar Binks in the Star Wars set, a pink sled in the Friends set, and a chainsaw with log in the City set.
The chainsaw is a clever build, using two pistols (or gas pumps, or fire hose handles, if you like) and a 1×1 brick with studs on four sides. The sled is pretty simple, but it includes “Panel 1 x 2 x 1 with Rounded Corners and Central Divider” in pink! And the less said about Jar Jar the better.
Every year LEGO puts out at least one Advent calendar, each one typically folowing a particular theme. This year for the first time (that I know of) we have three Advent calendars: Star Wars (9509)
I’m writing this on December 4th, so I’m a bit behind. I’m going to catch up by posting the first four entries tonight, and then try to stay on top of them each day. Unlike some bloggers I feel it is important for me to actually open up the set and build it on the day, but this weekend I was so busy and overwhelmed, and only got three hours of sleep Friday and Saturday nights thanks to being out too late and being woken up too early by factors beyond my control. Anyway, I’m back to a more normal sleep schedule now, and will endeavor to stay on top of this with a daily post. Wish me luck!
When I opened up Day 1 in each of the calendars I found a little plastic bag of LEGO parts and a little paper page. Each calendar has a paper page with the legal warnings about choking on small parts and pictures of other sets in that theme. When you open the door for each day, there’s a small picture of the set you are to build on the back side of the door, and you pull out the little plastic bag and build it. There’s no step by step instructions though, so it can be a little more difficult to build the more intricate models than a typical LEGO set that spoon feeds the build to you in individual steps. They’re never all that hard though.
The big surprise I got however came when I opened the Friends calendar for Day #1, and found the wrong parts! I opened a couple of other doors at random and found the same thing. Eventually I figured out that my set was built wrong. I don’t know if they’re all this way or if I just got one that was defective, but the tray that contains all the stuff to build was put in backward. I opened up the box, pulled out the plastic tray with 24 bins in it, turned it around, and put it back in, and then not only Day #1 but the other doors I had opened were now correct.
Anyhow, I built the three models, and here they are – a micro scale space ship for the Star Wars calendar, a minidoll in the Friends calendar, and a firefighter minifig (with an extra helmet and bullhorn) in the City calendar.
The spaceship is the only thing that is at all challenging to build, of course, and the parts assortment is pretty ordinary, so there’s not much to write about.