Friends Advent Calendar 2018

The Rambling Brick’s Advent-ure 2018 #2

ramblingbrick Lego

Today, we continue our Advent journey, reviewing Celebratory Sets from the Holiday season. Yesterday, we took a look at the first Advent Calendar from 1998.  Today we travel further back, to 1977, when the first Brick Built Santa Sets were released.

 This is set 246 Santa and Sleigh. It is one of the earliest festive season sets produced.  With just 68 pieces, this set is all about using basic bricks to put together Santa, a reindeer and the Sleigh.  The design aesthetic is typical of Scandinavian Christmas Decorations and trinkets of the time, and I could see this happily sitting amongst them on a mantlepiece. Another example of late 70’s design is 245 ‘Two Santas’. According to Bricklink, this set was released in 1978, and was perfect if you had several children in the house ready to come to blows over the presumptive ownership of the LEGO Santa model. Comparing these two sets,  I love the way that two roof tiles are used to make Santa’s hat. I see that by turning them around,  they can be jaunty and jolly, or strictly business-like, depending on whether you have been Naughty or Nice.

Seen in the Vault in Billund, according to Brickset: Two Santas 245

Catching up with our Friends #2

Window number two features the ‘Flying Music’ symbol, which makes me wonder if this might be a build associated  with Andrea in some way.

Click below the break to see where the 2018 Friends Advent Calendar takes us today. 

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The Rambling Brick Advent-ure 2018 #1

ramblingbrick Lego ,

This year, we have celebrated a HUGE number of anniversaries associated with the LEGO Group. Sixty years of the LEGO Brick, Forty years of the Minifigure, Twenty years of Mindstorms and Ten years of Power Functions.

Regular readers will have followed my 40th anniversary of the minifigure covert celebration articles, and have come to realise that I am always happy to draw a long bow when it comes to searching for coincidences.  Imagine my joy when I discovered that this is also the twentieth anniversary of the first LEGO Advent Calendar: released in 1998.  And so my theme is set. In order to avoid perky spoiler photos of the Friends Advent Builds, I will start each post in this series with a brief presentation of one of the sets or themes  produced by the LEGO Group in the celebration of the Christmas Holiday season.

Can I find twenty four themes to fill the period of advent? Time will tell.

Brick Based Advent Calendar: 1298

This year’s LEGO Friends Calendar contains no minimills, and consists predominantly of  mini builds. However, this is not the first time a ‘mini build centric’ advent calendar has been released.

In 1998, the LEGO group released their first advent calendar. Set 1298 had 24 mini builds, in the style of older angular LEGO builds.  It would appear that there was no need for significant variations between the different builds, although we do see a variety of boats, planes, cars and creatures. The same Santa minifigure even appears twice!

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