Tag Archives: Holiday

From New Year’s Day through Christmas, each year is full of holidays celebrated by the diverse cultures of the world — Setsubun in Japan, Halloween in America, and so many more. LEGO builders love to create seasonal models to celebrate these red-letter days.

Announcing 10229 Winter Village Cottage [News]

LEGO’s latest addition to what is obviously now an annual line of holiday-themed village sets is 10229 Winter Village Cottage, unveiled this evening at Brickfair in Virginia. The set includes nearly 1,500 pieces, costs $100, and will be available this October.

See all the photos on Flickr.

10229 Winter Village Cottage

Ages 12+. 1,487 pieces.
US $99.99 CA $129.99 DE 99.99 € UK 89.99 £ DK 899 DKK

Get cozy in the Winter Village Cottage!

Continuing the winter series, build the Winter Village Cottage for a perfect holiday home. Seat Grandpa snugly by the fireplace with his newspaper as you help Dad to put up the tree, then bake a feast in the kitchen with Mom! When it’s time to stock up the storage shed with firewood, bring the kids for a ride with Dad on the sled watch him cut the wood with his chainsaw deep in the forest. When the snow gets really deep, clear the road with the snowplow, take all of the kids skiing or build an igloo to play in. There’s no cozier place to spend long, frosty nights!

Includes 8 minifigures: mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, 3 children and snowplow driver with assorted accessories

Features cottage, storage shed, igloo, streetlamp, sled and snowplow

Accessories include kitten, owl, fireplace with LEGO® light brick function, chandelier, Christmas tree, wreath, gifts, armchair, kitchen appliances and bed

Storage shed features tools and firewood elements

Igloo features fireplace and removable roof

Detach the snowplow to store it in the back of the truck!

Make the fireplace glow with the LEGO® light brick!

Decorate the cottage!

Fetch firewood with the sled!

Drive the snowplow!

Cottage measures 6.7” (17 cm) high, 9.8” (25 cm) wide and 5.5” (14 cm) deep

Storage shed measures 4.3” (11 cm) high, 2.7” (7 cm) wide and 2.7” (7 cm) deep

Igloo measures 2.7” (7 cm) high, 2.7” (7 cm) wide and 2.7” (7 cm) deep

Snowplow measures 2.7” (7 cm) high, 7” (18 cm) long (with plow attached) and 2.3” (6 cm) wide

Add the new Winter Village Cottage to other LEGO® Winter Village series models like the 10199 Winter Toy Shop, 10216 Winter Village Bakery and 10222 Winter Village Post Office.

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Bovine Valentine’s

Flickr user crises_crs portrays the new Collectible Minifig Series 6 Minotaur trying to put the mooves on a heifer in this beefed up vignette.

Happy Chinese New Year!

As OJ says over on The Living Brick, “The great thing about Japan and China using the same zodiacal chart but celebrating the New Year on different dates is that I get to do this twice!” Indeed.

Schneider Cheung celebrates the Year of the Dragon with the most wonderfully sculpted Chinese dragon I’ve ever seen.

Meanwhile, rack911 celebrates with a depiction of Cai Shen, the God of Wealth, complete with a golden dragon and a bowl for treasure.

Happy Year of the Dragon!

Something I look forward to every New Year’s Day is the lovely LEGO creations by Japanese builders celebrating the new year, most often incorporating the animal from the Chinese Zodiac. I generally wait a couple days and do a roundup, but Moko‘s dragon is too gorgeous to share later.

(And since we get at least one comment about this every year, Japan celebrates New Year’s on January 1st every year. Chinese New Year is based on the lunar calendar, the exact date varies by year, and is celebrated by many other Asian cultures. Just not Japan.)

Just click to donate to Toys for Tots – and win fabulous prizes!

LEGO is running a charity toy drive this year at LEGOSantaYoda.com. All you have to do is send an e-greeting and LEGO will donate a toy to Toys for Tots. You can send as many e-cards as you want, and LEGO donate a toy for every message you send.

To make things less annoying for your friends and relations, our compatriots over at FBTB have set up a special e-mail account where you can send the messages.

Here’s how it works:

Go to LEGOSantaYoda.com

Select a greeting card.

Fill in the form with your name and email address. Enter FBTB for recipient and giveaways@fbtb.net as the address. Enter a message of “For the Tots!”

Hit send.

Hit the back button on your browser.

The information you entered should still be there. Hit send again!

Go to step 5

FBTB assures us that every message will be opened so that it counts, and LEGO says that they’ll honor every message sent to this FBTB address. I’d love to see the LEGO fan community get together and collectively enable a million donated toys this holiday season!

But wait, there’s more! LEGO fan sites are also putting up fabulous prizes, not least of which is every single promotional LEGO Star Wars minifigure ever released (donated by FBTB).

Oh yes, you read that right. So, what’re you waiting for? Get clicking!

Christmas gets off to a LEGO start with 38-foot tree at St. Pancras in London

LEGO Certified Professional Duncan Titmarsh of Bright Bricks (who was also involved in building James May’s LEGO house) recently led a project to create what is likely the world’s tallest LEGO Christmas tree at London’s St. Pancras train station.

LEGO Christmas tree

Standing 38 feet (12 m) tall and built from 600,000 bricks, you can see the tree in person on the lower concourse at St. Pancras through January 2.

Thanks to all the readers who sent us links about this.

Update: Lots more pictures on The Verge.

The Emperor’s Christmas Arrival

Mos Eisley used Star Wars minifigures to create this Christmas version of the Emperor’s arrival. Can you identify all the minifigs used, including the chrome stormtroopers?

Via FBTB

Deck the hall with boughs of LEGO

The weather outside might be frightful, but we’ve got plenty to keep us inside and warm. And that includes building ornaments for our trees, if that’s the holiday you choose to celebrate.

Chris McVeigh has posted his series of five ornaments, each designed to bring a bit of life and character to your decorations this holiday season! Each has instructions, so happy building!

LEGO Black Friday sales & deals [News]

Black Friday 2011 is here, which means the LEGO Shop online is having a bunch of deals to get your holiday shopping started.

Here’s what you get, November 25-28:

Free shipping on all orders of $49 or more
Free Limited Edition Holiday set featuring Santa Minifigure with orders of $99 or more
10% off all orders of $149 or more
25% off a bunch of sets (list below)

All of the following sets are 25% off (plus a few other Duplo, Belville, LEGO Games, and other non-System sets):

Republic Swamp Speeder
Winter Toy Shop
Cad Bane’s Speeder
Skeleton Bowling
Race Truck
Public Transport Station
Horse Stable
Imperial Flagship
Tank Truck
Tantive IV“
Repair Truck
Republic Dropship with AT-OT Walker
Obi-Wan’s Jedi Starfighter”
Emerald Night

Creations for Charity deadline approaching, new MOCs listed

Each year, Nannan and several other organizers run a fundraising event for Toys for Tots called Creations for Charity.

The team has just listed several new creations in their online store.

Fine print: Creations for Charity is a fundraising event for the Toys for Tots charity organization. As such, donations to Creations for Charity itself are not tax-deductible. Creations for Charity is not affiliated with The Brothers Brick.

If you’d like to donate a creation yourself, the deadline for doing so is November 15.

Don’t miss Nannan’s writeup about last year’s fundraiser, which resulted in over $14,000 worth of LEGO for underprivileged children.

Happy Halloween 2011!

Have a fantastic holiday! I hope your costumes are awesome, you gorge yourself on candy and sweets, and there are plenty of trick-or-treaters to your door.

Oh! And I hope you don’t run into this guy:

Many thanks to Jamie Spencer for his fantastic advent calendar this year. If you missed any of them, you can see the whole gallery here!

LEGO vampire Jack-o’-Lantern

LEGO’s North American Community Coordinator Kevin Hinkle participated in a recent Halloween contest at work. The pumpkin-decorating contest required participants to include at least five LEGO elements. Kevin’s pumpkin uses the design from the recent Collectible Minifigure vampire.

I like how Kevin left the edges “rough,” as though the vampire painter minifig actually painted it.