It’s turned to fall in the Northern Hemisphere, there’s a chill in the air and the leaves are turning depending on where you are, and it’s time for Halloween decor… just kidding, of course, it’s time for Christmas stuff already. There’s a Winter Village Multiverse developing between the human world and the North Pole/Santa/Elves world, and this year we get another addition to the the Santa side of the portal. LEGO Icons 10339 Santa’s Post Office contains 1,440 pieces and 5 minifigures and will be available October 4th for US $99.99 | CAN $129.99 | UK £89.99. LEGO Insiders will have early access starting October 1st. You might think, oh, of course, Santa probably gets more mail than anyone else in the world, there must be a huge facility to process it! Read on to learn the alleged truth about Santa’s mail.
The LEGO Group provided The Brothers Brick with an early copy of this set for review. Providing TBB with products for review guarantees neither coverage nor positive reviews.
Unboxing the parts, instructions, and sticker sheet
The format for adult-focused (or at least premium-marketed) sets has been pretty stable for a while now, so we’ll focus on small details. Last year the set name had two small pine trees above it, for the Two Pines Inn. For Santa’s Post Office, the classic LEGO mail horn logo is used, with some extra holly as decoration. The back of the box shows the play features, where the light brick is, and of course, the suspiciously cozy open back of what we still assume is the largest mail sorting facility in human history. The box, sadly, is a standard thumb punch, not the new lift-off lid style.
Inside are 10 numbered paper bags, 2 instruction booklets, and a small sticker sheet.
Here’s a closer look at those stickers:
The instructions have a small intro welcoming us to the North Pole Post Office. It says that Season’s Greetings are pouring in and Santa replies by sprinkling festive cheer. I suppose lots of kids do write to say hi to Santa, not just to ask for loot, but the desired reply in most cases is probably not only a sprinkling of cheer.
The build
Sliding smoothly into the build, we’ll tackle the small instruction booklet first, since that goes with bags one and two. This bag gives us two of our elves and a couple of small builds. The first one LEGO describes as “an ice-fishing scene”, but immediately raises some questions about how Santa’s mail is handled. Why is the elf ice-fishing for mail? Did it just fall into the ice-fishing hole? Or do letters to Santa arrive under the ice? Is the seal a helper, or is it just there to eat the fish that comes around when the elf fails to catch a letter? Does the seal approve? Do we already have a Seal of Approval joke? Oh. Yes. Yes, we do.
Next up is a mailbox with a signpost. The references to Santa’s Workshop the Elf Clubhouse, and other LEGO sets that are in the Winter Village Santaverse are great touches. The sign for the North Pole Post is also lovely – though maybe it’d be better if it matched a sign on the building itself. But … why is there a mailbox? Who is putting letters in the post AT the North Pole? The seal? Maybe some polar bears? Just give them the fish!
We’ve also got the requisite Christmas tree, along with an elf on a sled who is … delivering mail and presents. Why? To whom? Where is this letter going? Between different factories in the Santa Industrial Complex? Black hockey sticks are nice to have though and are a great part of usage as sled runners, so let’s focus on that.
Finally, there’s a sorting machine that can direct something put into it to one side or the other, and two mail carts that can receive mail from the sorting machine.
Apparently, Santa gets (or sends?) junk mail. This is a great time to have, but why are we inflicting it on Santa? What is Santa supposed to have won?
Let’s move on to the down-to-earth, totally functional, massive postal sorting facility that’s needed to handle the volume of gimmes – err, greetings – that are sent to Santa every year. First up is the base needed to support this massive tribute to industrial efficiency… complete with a cozy area rug.
Bag four mostly finishes Santa’s study. It’s very cozy. This does not seem like an efficient way to handle millions of pieces of mail, though.
The furniture in the study includes an appropriately ornate and cozy chair and a table with candles and a list. There’s a nice varied bookshelf, for all of that downtime that Santa has for reading things other than ransom notes polite requests for gifts. And on the other side of the wall, there’s a letter sorter that makes some nice use of panel pieces, but is household-sized, not industrial.
The fifth bag starts filling out the rest of the post office. The front has some snowy details added, especially in the middle section between the double-sided fireplace (how do they avoid horrible drafts in Santa’s study?) and the entrance.
From the other side, we can see some of the interior details, including a stack of mail and packages inside the door, a coffee machine – we endorse – and a writing desk that later seems to hold Santa’s list.
Snow builds up around the windows and logs are piled ready for the fire:
A system of ramps is built into the upper floors to allow mail to go from several locations into the sorting machine that we built in bag two.
Santa gets a nicely detailed writing room on the second floor – the study chair can move up here easily if desired – with more light, a wax seal for his letters, and a handy bin to just toss finished missives into. Wait, how much mail does Santa send out? Is this post office here entirely to accommodate Santa’s pen pal habit?
The top of the facade uses some half-curved tiles as guides to align roof edges as full detailing is added. The 4×4 quarter-circle tile has a little bit of wiggle room but is otherwise held securely in place by the dark blue tiles and the nougat ones that border it.
The finished facade looks good. It’s fun how the slant of the ramp visible through the central window matches the slope of the snow on that window.
The holly details, attached to curved plates with bar handles on top of the first-floor windows do a good job simulating some randomness and natural variation. And the brick-built horn for the LEGO Mail emblem is a real highlight. It would have been nice to have some sort of “North Pole Station” post office signage on the building itself, though.
The roof for the topmost section includes an arrow that points into the bit where Santa chucks his outgoing correspondence. But it also lines up, yellow pieces to yellow pieces, when assembling the roof, and tells you what goes where. It’s a nice dual touch from the designers. The overall 90-degree roof design will be familiar to anyone who’s built 10332 Medieval Town Square.
The large curved panels – most commonly used for hot air balloon panels, though a favorite usage was in the LEGO Batman Movie “The Penguin Arctic Roller” set as a wheel arch – have come in pearl gold before, but dark green is a brand new color and this will be a highlight for some builders. The hot air balloon basket includes room for the pilot in a relatively confined space, along with a tray for letters that can be dumped into the post office’s sorting chutes. It’s not enough capacity to make a dent in Santa’s mail, though.
There’s a clear bar that makes things a little bit more structurally sound but mostly serves to conduct the glow from the light brick down to the burner in a way that’s more structured of how a hot air balloon burner works and looks than if it wasn’t there. The light brick isn’t so bright that it’s visible in direct lighting, so excuse the extra shadows:
The completed model
This set feels like it’s a little small, a little lacking. But trying to compare it fairly to the last five years of Winter Village sets, it stacks up just fine. It’s not very deep – about 8 studs for most of the interior – and the chonky white curved pieces in the roof account for a good bit of bulk – but it’s a nice facade. The facing-out timbers, the holly, the windows, the snow; it’s a pretty good-looking building.
What happens here, hey, it’s LEGO, you need to use your imagination. How the hot air balloon delivers enough mail at a time to keep up with Santa’s demands is a mystery. Maybe the seal is Santa in disguise and doesn’t need to read the mail, he just absorbs it through the ocean water.
The minifigures
The included Santa is a very nice figure, though it’s the same one included in 10293 Santa’s Visit as well as last year’s advent calendar. Dual-molded legs with black boots mean that Santa’s feet are nice and dry whenever he has to wade into the North Atlantic to retrieve his mail.
The four included elves are mostly the same, with slightly different heads and a few accessories. The torsos all include the North Pole Post logo, making them unique from previous helpers.
They all have minimal back printing. Two have alternate facial expressions, one of which is fully hidden by the balloon pilot’s helmet, but the elf hat doesn’t quite hide the other.
Conclusions and recommendations
Santa’s Post Office … well, if I were Santa, I suppose I’d have a cozy study with a library rather than an industrial mail sorting facility. The real puzzler here is who is Santa writing to? Many, many stories talk about writing to Santa; very few give equal weight to his outgoing correspondence. This, it seems, is one of them. Dropping some of the more existential questions: with over 1,400 pieces, price per piece isn’t an issue here, and while there are plenty of small presents and other bits, there are also new curved hot air balloon panels in dark green and plenty of larger pieces mixed in. If you like the subject, it’s fine value. As a facade, it’s a nice-looking building, though the hot air balloon landing pad sticks out. But it feels a bit small compared to previous Winter Village sets. Maybe it’s more pieces put into detail; maybe it’s the pieces that go into the mailbox and the ice fishing hole that don’t further the central story of this set.
The mail-sorting mechanisms work pretty well, and I have to say it’s mechanically satisfying, even if it doesn’t make the most sense. Other details in the set are nice, but not groundbreaking; the flip side of a premium, supposedly 18+ set that’s been carefully designed to be easy for the whole family to build is that there are not many advanced techniques to learn from here. You, dear reader, can take those green and red mail carts on a voyage to your bins of unused random parts, and construct the facility that this mail so richly deserves. And this set? It’s a fair deal; don’t overthink it. If it appeals to you, you’re probably going to like it just fine. If not, or you’re not sure? You likely won’t miss this one.
LEGO Icons 10339 Santa’s Post Office contains 1,440 pieces and 5 minifigures, and will be available October 4th (early Insiders access October 1st) from LEGO.com for US $99.99 | CAN $129.99 | UK £89.99. Also available from 3rd party sellers like Amazon and eBay.
The LEGO Group provided The Brothers Brick with an early copy of this set for review. Providing TBB with products for review guarantees neither coverage nor positive reviews.
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Pretty disappointed about this set. Pretty poor and design is not very original.
Santa is known to have written to children from time to time. I recommend a look at the “Father Christmas Letters” that J.R.R.Tolkien wrote. :)